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SecUnits don't get sleep-deprived. We don't sleep, we have recharge cycles, and enough of my brain is a machine that I've never experienced heavy eyelids or yawns.
(Occasional yawns had been included in my initial move-like-a-human code. I'd tried it a couple of times, and was so appalled by how stupid it looked on me that I'd deleted those lines. I would rather risk seeming unnaturally awake to humans than suffer through the indignity of standing around with my mouth open like that.)
But I had to admit that the constant strain of existing in Corporate space was wearing on me. I'd been fully alert for two weeks, foregoing even the briefest recharge periods. I'd ruined the motors of two of my drones by 'haranguing' them--Professor Bharadwaj's words, not mine--to fly faster.
I wasn't sure what human exhaustion felt like. But the station's gravity seemed to pull harder on my limbs than usual, and my cognition was a few microseconds slower. An old episode of Sanctuary Moon was playing in my private feed space, but I was only half-watching.
My eyes were oddly transfixed on the sight of Dr. Gurathin removing his make-up.
He was definitely tired. He'd yawned three times since sitting down with his little bag of cosmetics. (He'd muffled the sound and sight into the crook of his elbow. A common human gesture, perhaps a little less dumb than giving all and sundry a look at his tonsils, but still silly-looking.)
"Do you think it's safe to go out there?" said Officer Hordööp-Sklanch nervously, peering around the big, sprawling flora in front of him. It was quite out of character for the visiting diplomat to have asked for his company during the planetside mission. But I was willing to tolerate it.
First Gurathin used a damp disposable wipe to remove any color from his cheeks, nose, and forehead. The uneven pigmentation of his skin reappeared. I heard the thin fabric rasp over his stubble, which was just barely visible along his cheeks and jaw after the long day. (My language module informed me that this was often called a 'five o'clock shadow.' Why were humans so weird?)
I wasn't sure why I was looking at him at all. I could have been using my drones to monitor Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee instead, who were sprawled on opposite ends of the hotel suite's couch and not-watching a muted news channel on the big display surface. (Pin-Lee had the distant look of working in the feed. Bharadwaj had one of the destroyed drones in her lap and was bending over it, poking it with tiny instruments and making soothing noises.)
Gurathin peered at himself in the mirror he'd set up. From this angle I could see his face well, though the risk of accidental eye contact was minimal. The wet wipe had removed the strange shadows he'd painted this morning, which made it look like his bones had been rearranged. My facial recognition software had not liked them, at all.
Gunfire erupted in my feed space. The diplomat's hand closed around Hordööp-Sklanch's arm just in time and yanked him back. The fauna where his head had been exploded into shards of wood. He yelped and paled, stumbling in shock.
A small bottle had been sitting by Gurathin's elbow. The blue-white liquid inside had separated into two distinct, greasy-looking layers. I'd tagged the thing as a potential threat--if Gurathin tried to drink it, I would stop him, because clearly whatever the fluid was, it was long expired. But now he picked up the bottle and shook it, then dribbled the substance onto a few small cotton pads.
Oh. It wasn't a drink after all. And probably not expired. The liquid was a uniform pale blue now, and Gurathin held one of the cotton things on his left closed eyelid. He was not applying any pressure as far as I could see. He was just... keeping it there.
His visible eye was downcast, motionless. He sat too still. Was he crying? My organics dumped a bit of cortisol into my system, and I hurriedly looked away.
One of my remaining drones, resting high up on a decorative ledge on the wall, showed no tears on Gurathin's cheeks though. He met his own gaze in the mirror again, then... dragged the cotton pad over his eyelid, slowly, and quite a bit of black came off with it?
The drone feed wasn't enough. I had to use my eyes again. I stared at the white cotton, transfixed, as it grew gray and spotty black as he kept wiping off the make-up.
Why did he need the fluid? Was simple water not enough? And why had he put black on his eyelashes? They were already black. I zoomed in, then took a clear shot of both of his eyes, comparing. I couldn't see a difference.
The diplomat was kindly not holding Hordööp-Sklanch's panting anxiety against him. I was barely watching the episode anymore; I knew it backwards and forwards anyway. She'd cupped his face in her palms and was talking softly.
"You've survived space battles," she said. "And that thing last year, when the wormhole nearly tore all of you apart. You can do this."
Hordööp-Sklanch half-laughed, wide-eyed. "I h-had my crew with me for that!" he stammered. "And here..." He waved his arms at the wooded area. "I don't have a whole spaceship protecting me!"
Gurathin tilted his head back and wiped at his eye from below. I took a photograph of the ridiculous expression he made. You never knew when you might need blackmail material. More dark color came off. His lashes looked no different.
He dampened another cotton thing, then pressed it to his other eye. I said, "Why do you take it all off?"
Gurathin flinched. I hadn't realized how absorbed he'd grown by his little ritual. He glanced into the mirror towards me. His eyebrows raised, but then he politely looked away again.
"It's not good for the skin to leave it overnight."
Humans. So fragile. I started a quick search of the feed in the background.
The diplomat kept talking, her hand now on the panicking officer's chest, coaching him to breathe with her. When I'd watched this episode for the first time, I had updated my client retrieval protocols accordingly.
"But you have to put it back on every morning," I pointed out. "That seems like a hassle."
Gurathin was dabbing carefully at his other eye. Perhaps it was more sensitive. From a MedSys file that I'd definitely not downloaded illegally, I knew that that side of his head held more augments than the other, especially behind his eye socket.
"Leaving it on too long gives you wrinkles," he said.
"You already have wrinkles," I said, which made him laugh under his breath for some reason.
Case in point: when he chuckled, the lines around his eyes deepened. Before, he'd had some concoction of make-up on to make them less visible. And anyway, he hadn't had much cause for more than empty, polite half-smiles today.
The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were little furrows in his skin, dampened by the dissolver. Inexplicably, my performance reliability rose by half a percentage point. I was obviously much more tired than I'd thought.
"I do," he said. "Well, I'd get more wrinkles if I left it on."
I thought about explaining the very basic concept of aging to him, and the forward march of time. The slower I spoke, the more he would scowl. It might be amusing to poke at him like that, but...
I decided not to examine why I didn't. Instead, I compiled a dossier of some articles that my feed search had turned up. "There are permanent options," I said, and sent it along to him.
Gurathin skimmed the file, his gaze going distant, then he grimaced, just a brief twist of his mouth. "I don't want..."
He paused. Glanced at me in the mirror, a look quick enough not to really count as eye contact. "I used to have that," he said, sending back a brief list to me. "Before... well. Before I came to Preservation."
I looked at the list, saw the highlighted words 'eyelash implants' and couldn't help but shudder physically. It took me a moment to wrestle the unwanted mental image away (some humans had artificial eyelashes grafted into their lids, risking infection and swelling on those delicate parts, voluntarily?). Ugh. This could not be what billions of years of evolution were meant for.
"Wait," I said, staring at Gurathin in the mirror. "I thought that was permanent. So it can get removed?"
He nodded. "Laser surgery." He was wiping at his eyes again, with fresh cotton pads this time. It surprised me how much gray-black still came off.
And he would have refused painkillers, of course. I shoved that mental image away too (lasers poking at eyelids, why?!). The human code made me shiver again, then roll my shoulders forward and back. It actually helped with the crawl of discomfort.
Officer Hordööp-Sklanch and the diplomat had made it to the facility that held the mission-critical files by now. The officer was sweaty and pale, but more or less composed.
On the couch, Bharadwaj was talking to the drone. Ineffectively, since it was powered off, but she didn't seem deterred. "It'll be okay," she said softly. Something clattered as she tinkered with its insides. "I know being powered off is scary, but I promise I'm trying to help..."
"Why all the black?" I asked. "Your eyelashes are already black."
Gurathin sighed. "The difference is admittedly subtle--"
"Invisible," I corrected.
He huffed at me. "It's about looking a certain way. Competent. Put together. Professional."
... He was always put together, if 'put together' meant 'so fully clothed that not an inch of skin showed beyond his head, neck, and hands'. The only time I'd seen him rumpled and sweaty was when he'd been sick on our original survey.
(And then, of course, right after he'd given me back my memories. He'd been disheveled and exhausted then, too. It was... both a good memory and not.)
I watched the light reflect off the shiny surface of his cheekbone, where the wipes had left a bit of moisture. The uneven pigmentation of his skin did not seem to follow any particular pattern. Beyond the polished and edited visuals of my shows, I had no concept of human beauty standards. I didn't see why anyone would conceal something as insignificant as the presence--or absence--of melanin.
"I don't get it," I said.
Gurathin was unscrewing a small container. In the bottle, the liquid for removal was already separating again, big globs of white and blue that I found oddly unpleasant to look at.
"Make-up is an old Corporate habit for me," he said. His voice was slow, thoughtful. He wasn't looking at me in the mirror anymore. "I know how to use it to adjust to different situations and clientele. I had to be palatable to a variety of targets, you see."
The word 'palatable' made something near my energy weapons itch. I said, "You're annoying even with make-up on."
He laugh-sighed again. "Thanks for that."
The odd thing was, I had a feeling he meant it. I felt my face pull into a frown.
I dug into my memory archives, accessing my logs from two months ago, when a harvest festival on Preservation had brought me down to the planet. I hate planets, yes, but Dr. Mensah had invited me--with an added note that she fully understood if I was busy or simply did not want to go--and I had to admit that it'd been... not terrible.
There'd been a bonfire on Dr. Mensah's farm, tended by fireproof bots, which my humans had thankfully steered well-clear of. Cake and refreshments and a gaggle of running, giggling children. A few cameras for me to use, mounted high up in the trees, which had given me several emotions.
And Dr. Gurathin with make-up on his face. I compiled a few screenshots of my recordings, then sent them along to him.
"Why wear it at all?" I asked. "If it reminds you of before?"
He examined the photos. "It's not the same," Gurathin said. "You're not Company property anymore, but still wear armor on our surveys, don't you?"
Well, yes. But that armor had been made by ART, carefully printed and tested for durability. And it had no Company logo or serial numbers.
... And Gurathin still wore make-up, but non-permanent stuff.
I scowled at the back of his head. At some point I had paused my episode without quite realizing it. (The diplomat was stretching up towards Hordööp-Sklanch's face, eyes closed, her lips already pursed. I usually fast-forwarded past this part.)
A small, squishy feeling was warming up my organics, my neural tissue swimming in a nice cocktail of human connection chemicals. Kinship. With Gurathin. Gross.
A small chirp came from the couch. The drone that Bharadwaj had been working on was back online. Its running lights lit up and it hefted itself up onto its little legs, its camera rotating slowly to scan the room.
Bharadwaj beamed at it. "There you are, little one," she said. "Isn't that better?"
Gurathin was smearing something different on his face now, with his hands. His skin grew shiny, then less so as the lotion was absorbed.
My limbs felt heavy. Even my feet, which were on the floor. There'd been no gravitational changes that my scanners could detect. 'Tired' was probably the word for it.
My move-like-a-human code was pulling at me. I let it run, and it tilted me sideways in the chair and propped my cheek up on one fist. This way, my energy weapon pointed at my head, but the position felt oddly comfortable to my organic tissue.
"Why alter your face so much here?" I asked. "With the... shadows?" I had no idea what it was called. "You don't do that on Preservation."
"The contouring?" he asked. He carefully applied some different lotion onto the fragile skin under his eyes. "It confuses facial recognition programs."
No shit. "Including mine," I said.
Gurathin sent an amusement sigil into the feed. "It's not funny, asshole," I said. My voice sounded kind of whiny, but I couldn't seem to change that. "You don't look like yourself with all that on your face."
"Well, no, that's the point."
"You're supposed to look like you. It's basic genetics."
In the mirror he raised his eyebrows. "Okay, Mx. 'I had Perihelion alter my configuration on our first meeting.'"
"That was different," I griped. "To make me look like not a SecUnit."
Gurathin turned both of his palms upwards in a sort of shrug. "There you have it. I'm doing the same thing. Just less permanent."
"Well, your bare face won't get you flagged as a hostile entity and shot on sight."
I wasn't sure what I had expected, but Gurathin's small, grim smile was not it. "As far as you know," he said. He closed the little tin of cream he'd been using with a decisive click.
That got me a dump of adrenaline into my organics. "What?"
A wince passed across his features, a sort of 'oh shit' look. "Forget it," he said quickly. "That's not going to happen."
... He'd really just said "forget it" to an advanced surveillance device with a wonky threat assessment module. I guess I really had been tired before, because the stress hormones felt like being kicked. There was an unpleasant cold rush across my skin, and the phantom sensation of a drop where I had no stomach.
"SecUnit, calm down," Gurathin said, alarmed. He actually turned his chair around to face me--at least this one swiveled, and didn't have to be dragged awkwardly. His hands were half-raised, placating. "That won't happen. The chances of anyone from-- from before, seeing me here, are..."
"I am calm," I snapped. My weapons sent a request to recalibrate to my system. I didn't let them. "And you are a moron."
Gurathin sighed. He had the gall to look exasperated. "SecUnit..."
"No." I pointed a finger at him--one of the more satisfying lines of code. "Is there a fucking reason why you kept this from me?"
"I didn't," he said. He was starting to frown. I only realized how relaxed his shoulders had been when they began creeping back up towards his ears. "There was nothing to tell. We all have enemies here. This is the Corporation Rim."
My teeth wanted to grind. For a second or two I let them, and the pressure felt good, like some of the twisty chill in my body dissipated with it.
"That's a technicality and you know it," I said. My voice sounded weird again. "Bharadwaj won't get shot if anyone sees her."
Gurathin tilted his chin up. "I don't plan on being recognized, hence the make-up." He was speaking in a way I didn't like, sort of smooth and impersonal, but angry underneath.
"I shot Leebeebee right next to your head,", I snarled. "You of all people should know how easy it is to kill a human!"
He glared, and I glared right back. The fluids coursing through my body felt hot with indignation. My system was not-so-helpfully accessing the day's memory files: all the times Gurathin had been out of my line of sight, or only peripherally covered by drones or cameras. Every time someone had brushed past him, close enough to get a good look at his face.
I backburnered the process, but it popped right back up. "Why the fuck are you even here?" I said. "Why did you come on this-- trip?" I'd almost said 'mission'.
"Why are you back in corporate space as a rogue SecUnit?" he snapped back.
Wow. Why did he think I was here? For fun? It was a rhetorical question, but it pissed me right off. "To protect you all!" I said, louder than I'd meant to. "You idiot!"
"Well, there you go!" he said, his voice rising too. It was grimly satisfying to see the annoyed furrow in his brow. And at least he was starting to snap back at me properly, instead of this fake calm shit. "I--"
"Are you fighting?"
Professor Bharadwaj was peering at us over the back of the couch. She did not have her Disappointed Look down to a science the way Dr. Mensah did, but the twist of her mouth was sad enough that I had to look away.
The drone she'd fixed was hovering next to her. As soon as I made eye contact with it, it shrank back.
"No," we both said at the same time.
"Really?" Bharadwaj said. She frowned, unconvinced. "Because it sounds like you're about to shout at each other, and I thought we'd all gotten over that after the survey..."
Gurathin blew a breath out through his nose. Perhaps it'd been meant to be calming, but his nostrils flared with the force of it. His voice was clipped and icy. "We're having a civil disagreement, and SecUnit is--"
At the same time, I said, "Apparently Dr. Gurathin has the self-preservation instincts of a--"
We both broke off. The repaired drone peeked cautiously over Bharadwaj's shoulder. Bharadwaj shook her head, sighing.
"You two," she said, pensive more than upset. "You're on the same side, you know? I think you need to achieve consensus."
Their horrid humming ritual that made even my lab-grown skin want to detach itself from my body. "No."
Gurathin was more diplomatic, although I could see a glint of panic in his eyes. "Bharadwaj, I'm sure you mean well," he said quickly, "but I don't think that's--"
"Everyone shut the fuck up," Pin-Lee said. "Or take your bickering elsewhere. I can't focus like this."
They had surfaced from the feed. They stretched their neck a little, wincing, then peered blearily at all of us.
"I have taken enough stimulants to give a draft horse a heart attack--sorry, Gura--" Gurathin had winced a little, but waved them off, "--and I am trying to assemble our notes for tomorrow, so be quiet. Both of you."
Pin-Lee didn't have a Disappointed Look, but instead they could glare with the best of them. I've been glared at a lot, and even I had to admit it was pretty impressive.
Their eyes were slightly red-rimmed from strain. That happened to some humans even when they were reading things in the feed instead of on a screen. I set an alert for myself in an hour's time to remind them to get some sleep, too.
They paused, waiting, but when neither Gurathin nor I said anything, they relaxed back into their end of the couch. "...Not you," they said to Bharadwaj, a bit awkwardly. "Hearing you talk to that drone was actually pretty soothing."
Bharadwaj brightened. She gave us one last concerned look, then turned back to Pin-Lee. "There's another one here that needs some help," she said. "I'm not an engineer, but fixing an overtaxed motor isn't too hard..."
She busied herself with the second drone. Pin-Lee leaned back into the couch cushions again.
Gurathin let out a carefully controlled sigh. He wiped a little spot of excess lotion off his nose.
"Look," he said, quieter now, and it took me a moment to realize he was still speaking to me. "I'm not like you. I can't jump in front of bullets or scale buildings. I'm not even as fast at hacking--"
I glowered over his shoulder, already opening my mouth to snap at him again. I didn't have time for his inferiority complex or whatever this was.
He held up a hand to forestall me. "But I can do this," he said. Too late, I realized that the new angle of his chair enabled him to see me in the mirror.
He looked almost right at me, his dark eyes insistent. "I can attend meetings, and speak these corporate fucks' language, and be palatable in a way they understand." He raised an eyebrow, ironic. "I know how they think. I was one of them."
For a moment it looked like he might add something else. He hesitated, but then his gaze slid away. Again he said, more to himself than to me, "I can at least do this."
I stared at his left shoulder, fuming. Not because that didn't make sense--it did--but because my anger cooled, fading in the face of something I could understand, whether I liked it or not.
I still had his profile tagged as 'I don't like him,' but that did not mean I wanted him hurt. Bothersome asshole or not, he was one of my humans, and he was putting himself in danger. (So was I. But I was less squishy, and also built for that sort of thing.)
Gurathin wanted to keep the others safe too, in his own way. I couldn't fault him for that.
He gathered up his things now, putting the cosmetics and the mirror into a small bag. "You're not going anywhere alone," I said. "If I ping you, you will ping back, I don't care if you're busy or tired. If you fucking sneeze I need to know about it."
Gurathin looked long-suffering as he zipped the bag shut. "Fine."
I peered at him suspiciously. Was that a tiny smile, nestled into the corner of his mouth? Fuck his Corporation Rim-flattened microexpressions. And those hormones were taking another swim through my neural network. It was really annoying how they made my limbs relax.
The repaired drone hovered closer now. When I re-established our connection, it actually pinged me, and offered me the highest resolution of Gurathin's side profile that its little camera was capable of producing.
The individual hairs of his stubble were growing in different directions, which was more than I'd ever wanted to know about them. My face pulled into a grimace. I could almost see his pores absorb the lotion.
I told the drone to tone it down--I wanted to keep an extra eye on Gurathin, not witness his cells multiplying in real time. The drone drooped a little where it hung in the air, then flew upwards into a sullen holding pattern.
"Well, I'm going to bed," Gurathin said. He stood up and stretched, his back popping audibly in several places. "Good night, everyone. Don't stay up too late."
Bharadwaj balanced her inert drone on her lap, stretching her arms over the back of the couch. Tall as he was, Gurathin had to fold himself nearly in half to hug her. He pinged both Pin-Lee and me, then gave me a curt nod and disappeared down the hall to the bedrooms.
In my private feed space, Officer Hordööp-Sklanch's 'I'm about to be kissed' face still looked as dumb as it had when I'd paused the episode. I fast-forwarded exactly 127 seconds, which was how long it took until an explosion shook the building and distracted him and the diplomat from mashing their faces together.
After a few minutes, Gurathin sent me a scan of his bedroom. There were no hidden listening devices, no cameras. He'd had only his augments to scan with, not my much more powerful array, but it was a start.
I sent back a read receipt. Then I sent the sulking drone down the hall to hover in front of his bedroom door. Its audio receptors were quite sensitive. I set a filter for anything that wasn't normal human sleep noises. The moment someone tried to climb in through Gurathin's window, I would be there.
Gurathin sent two sigils: annoyance and mild impatience. I said, Deal with it. You chose to come here.
There was a pause. The drone's view bobbed up and down, as if it was bouncing a little in the air. Bharadwaj would have said it was excited that it'd been given such an important task.
I did, he agreed, finally. And I... appreciate the extra security.
He did; I could tell. His pulse was slowing, calming much faster than usual. These past few days, even without a specific drone assigned to him, I'd heard him toss and turn for an hour before finally falling into an uneasy doze.
Now, he rolled over just once, then his breathing started to slow, too. I tried to tell my stunted endocrine system that I did not want any more happy chemicals. It didn't listen.
That's literally my job, I said tersely. Go to sleep.
A brief brush of metadata--faint amusement as Gurathin unfortunately sensed my mortification--then the connection closed.
I repeated the gesture that the human code had made earlier--shivering on purpose, then rolling my shoulders forward and back. It helped a little.
Well. Now that I'd been forced to have an emotion witnessed by Gurathin, of all people, I felt it was only right to look at some explosions. I unpaused my episode, but kept both the drone and my own visual input in my feed instead of backburnering them.
Bharadwaj's drone was offline, and had no way of hearing her soft murmurs. It made no sense, but I had to agree with Pin-Lee; the sound of her voice was calming. Pin-Lee's unfocused eyes were moving a little, another side effect of working in the feed. I made myself study their face for a moment. They looked less pissed off than before, so perhaps their work was finally cooperating.
The diplomat yelped when Hordööp-Sklanch suddenly seized her arm, making her skid to a stop. They'd both been sprinting down a hallway stained by the soot of an earlier explosion.
"I hear footsteps," he hissed. I could still see the whites all around his irises, but he'd calmed down a little from his earlier gibbering panic. "In here!"
He nudged open an automatic door that'd been rattling weakly, trying to close while small sparks burst from its mechanisms. The two of them ducked into the room just in time before a bunch of soldiers in heavy boots started swarming down the hall.
In his bedroom, Gurathin was silent and still. The drone registered no sound of shifting blankets. His heartbeat and breathing suggested that he was asleep.
He was less safe than he would have been back on Preservation--where his bare face would not inspire spontaneous gunfire--but he was resting and I was monitoring, so for now, it was enough.