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She was seeing less and less of SecUnit, these years.
Helping Ratthi and Arada with surveys, helping station security, hanging out with that research transport it was so fond of, and that documentary with Bharadwaj...
She was fine with this development. It could do whatever it wanted. She was glad it was finding the things it liked, and if that didn’t include her and her family, then so be it.
So, it was a pleasant surprise when she got the feed message from SecUnit, telling her that it’d be at her farm in an hour or so. It was supposed to be in the middle of another.. Cargo run? Mission? Something with the Perihelion. It wasn’t her business, but she still received the occasional update from it while it was on-station. It wasn’t unusual for it to check in with her while it was on Preservation, but, normally, when it was stopping by to hang out with her, it warned her days beforehand.
Originally, it was a week or so in advance, when it was first getting used to hanging out with the rest of the PreservationAux crew. Like it was giving them a chance to tell it to bug off, to tell it they were busy(even though both parties were well aware that SecUnit always checked their schedules ahead of time and asked to come when they didn't have anything going on.) Mensah appreciated it, because there were genuinely some times when things came up, but she wished it felt more invited–that it could stop by whenever it wanted, and it didn’t have to be a big deal.
The earliest it had announced it would come hang out with her was two days in advance. And she was happy with that little warning–but a couple of hours? What? Maybe its mission(cargo run?) had ended early. Had it ended poorly? She couldn’t do anything but speculate and worry over it until it actually came, however, so she decided to put it out of her mind and go back to musing over her paperwork. When it was here, she promised herself, she would figure things out.
It was largely late in the cycle, though. The offices around her were mostly empty. In a couple hours, it would be at the lisp of midnight, and SecUnit was particularly fond of telling her to get her ass to bed. So.. in short, yeah. Its behaviour was really quite off.
All she could do was wait and see, and be grateful it had chosen to come see her.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈
It looked exhausted, frankly.
Not in the way a human would–with puffy eyes circled in darkness, or messy hair and cracked lips from overworking and not taking breaks for necessities like drinks. No. It didn’t look anything like that. Its eyes looked dull(she tried hard not to look at them, she really did, but she was out of practice from SecUnit’s absence. And it was.. Really kind of shocking to see it like this.) They were keen and sharp when it was focused–she knew from experience–but now they looked sad, shadowed and withdrawn.
And, shockingly, it was.. clumsy. When she gestured to coax it in, its shoulder bumped into the doorframe, and she had to pretend like she didn’t notice, or see how startled it seemed at how uncoordinated it was. Its drones were following it on seemingly a delay, entering her office a whole five seconds after it had itself. Which was.. A little more than worrying.
She hesitated by the door. SecUnit hadn’t closed it after it had entered and plopped down on the sofa. It always closed the door. Whatever. She closed it gently and went to sit at her desk.
“SecUnit?”
It looked up at her for a second before dropping its head again. A couple drones level with her chin. Huh.
“Uh.. yes, Dr. Mensah?”
She brushed past the fact it wasn’t using the feed like it normally would. “You were on that trip with the Perihelion, right?”
It flinches and grimaces so hard she almost backtracks, but it talks before she can. “It.. went fine.”
Uh-huh.
She tries to keep the eyebrow arching to a minimum. It never answered questions it didn’t want to answer unless she directly asked them, and sometimes even then didn't answer the question. “I was under the impression it was meant to end later than this.”
“We.. finished early?”
“Because..?” She wasn’t one to push, normally. But SecUnit was acting off. Way off.
“We were fast.”
She checked her inbox, even though she had before SecUnit had come. “I thought Ratthi went on that trip with you? I haven’t heard from him yet, saying he’s on station.”
It puts its hands in its lap and a drone lands on her desk. “He’s still aboard. Uh. Aboard..”
Aboard the Perihelion, she concluded. She tapped into the station feed and began scrolling through the transports docked.
“How did it go?” She asked, mostly to stall, and partly because she always asked and it probably needed the familiarity right now.
“It went fine," it says again.
She went down the alphabetical list. The fact she couldn’t feel SecUnit poking around in her feed curiously also contributed to its out-of-it state. The Perihelion wasn’t docked. Or, at least, wasn’t listed as docked. She decided not to say anything about it and closed out of it.
So they sat in silence for at least a minute while she pretended to busy herself with more work in the feed and in front of her. She pretended not to notice how SecUnit fidgeted with the sleeves of its hoodie, or the way it was shifting more than usual, or how it wasn’t as active in the feed as it usually was.
“Dr. Mensah.” Its voice is strained and ever-so-slightly high-pitched. It yanks on its sleeves anxiously and the drone on her desk buzzes softly against the paper in front of her.
“Yes, SecUnit?” She asked, pretending not to notice again, putting down her pen.
It struggles with the silence for maybe thirty or so seconds while she watches the drone closest to her head patiently.
“Dr. Mensah, I’m six years past warranty,” it blurts. Its arms wrap around itself, like it hadn’t expected itself to say it.
She doesn’t ask what kind of years. Preservation? CR? PSUMNT? Whatever. She hesitates, searching for a reply. “You’re operating perfectly, SecUnit.” She doesn’t know where it comes from, but she hopes it's something it wants to hear.
“I was supposed to be scrapped for parts six preservation standard years ago, Dr. Mensah.” It sounds so uptight. She thinks that, if it could cry, it would.
Ah. that answers her unspoken question.
“You won’t be scrapped for any parts,” she reminds it gently.
“Dr. Mensah, I can’t take fifteen drones.”
“Pardon?”
“I used to be able to do over thirty, easily. Then it was twenty. I can’t do fifteen anymore. Dr. Mensah, I can’t–” it cuts itself off. Its eyes are trained hard on the carpet.
She pauses, wavering with it, trying very hard to keep her eyes trained on the drone by her shoulder and not her huddled friend on the couch curling in on itself. “You can’t what?”
It's quiet, shriveling in on itself as it pulls its feet up and its knees bump into its chin. The silence is loud, and she pulls up Bharadwaj’s contact so she can send a message quickly. Just in case.
“Dr. Mensah, I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
She expected lamenting about how old it was. She was ready, even, for the “I can’t do this anymore,” but she hadn’t expected that. If SecUnit wasn’t a protector, then she didn’t know who could be! It was built for protecting people. It was good at protecting people. And, as far as she was aware, it liked protecting people. From what she knew, it hadn’t ever lost a client where it was its fault for the fatality.
“Oh, SecUnit..” she quickly shoves the tone out of her voice. Now wasn’t the time to make it think she was pitying it. “You’re doing your job great.” Had something gone wrong this time? Had somebody been lost? Did it blame itself? “Why would you ever think otherwise?”
It shoves its logs at her, highlighting the timestamps where it had said it was losing the capability to hold fifteen drone inputs. She didn’t bother to count the drones in her office–it was probably straining itself to survey everything in the nearby area.
It’s quiet, again, leaning forward a bit, almost like it wants to go into the fetal position. “The mission didn’t end early.”
She tries not to tell it that she could tell. She waits patiently, folding her hands on her desk.
“It didn’t end early. It was going fine. Nobody got hurt.. Or anything. Me and ART fought. I hitched a ride on a random transport and came back to– to Preservation.”
Oh. That made sense–and probably why it hadn’t said its name earlier. She wasn’t the best at mediating their fights(the Perihelion was in the right most of the time, and she never wanted to tell SecUnit that) but SecUnit had come to her, specifically, and she wanted to help it. In a way that it liked. In a way that made it comfortable. And telling it that it was purposefully arguing with people and making things more difficult for itself due to being traumatized was not going to help it. It would only make it more upset(trust her. She knew. From experience.)
“And.. the others are alright? They’ll be safe, I mean.”
She’d seen–time and time again–SecUnit prioritize people’s safety over itself and its comfort, so she knew that this had to be something serious. Did it not trust its– its.. What had it called the Perihelion? Its assistant? But no, it couldn’t. If it didn’t trust its.. Its assistant anymore, then it certainly wouldn’t have left Ratthi alone with the Perihelion and its crew. Heck, it probably would have brought the entirety of its crew to Preservation–as she understood it, it was fond of them. But she didn’t know if it liked the Perihelion’s crew because of the Perihelion.
It looked stricken, almost. “I don’t want to betray them. I don’t want to betray you.”
She startled in her seat and it flinched. She quickly schooled her expression and smoothed out her woolen jumper. “You’re not betraying anybody, SecUnit.”
“I’m– I can’t.. I can’t do security anymore. I can’t hurt people. I’m going to get people hurt if I can’t do security right. I can’t.. I don’t– I don’t want–” it shook its head and rested its inorganic chin on its knee. It looked humiliated, boiling in its unfocused guilt and anger that it was probably misdirecting at itself. Then it continues, quieter. “I wasn’t built to last this long, Dr. Mensah. I’m going to fail. I’m going to.. To…”
She knew what it meant. “That’s not betraying anybody. That’s dying. That’s entirely different.” It shrinks slightly at her spelling it out so obviously. She sighs, then adds, quieter, “nobody will blame you for this, SecUnit. If your body is failing you, your body is failing you–and that's that. There’s not a lot we can do, because I’m assuming your fr–.. The Perihelion has already offered up everything it's capable of doing to help.”
Its eyebrows press together and its eyes slide to the wall of her office. It sends her a file in the feed–probably its logs again, if she had to guess–and she takes it. It’s a transcript of its logs so.. Close enough. She knew what its logs normally looked like–she knew that letter it had left it like the back of her hand(better, even, maybe) and it was filled with SecUnit sarcastic, pessimistic, and wonderfully SecUnit personally. This.. This had none of that.
[ART: you can not keep ignoring the inevitable. This trend shows your deteriorating feed and physical state will only get worse.]
She ignores how the only thing marking itself in its logs is a scrambled mix of numbers and letters. In her own copy, she changes it all to ‘SecUnit.’ She assumed that ART was some kind of nickname for the Perihelion, as she'd heard it say it a couple times, but that was less important to her at that moment.
[SecUnit: fuck off.
ART: I do not wish to discuss it, either, idiot. But it is either talk about it, or I just watch you silently suffer, which is unacceptable. Drop those extra drone inputs. You are unnecessarily straining and injuring yourself.
SecUnit: They’re monitoring Tarik and Kaede.
ART: I can monitor them; they are my responsibility right now.
SecUnit: Can we go back to watching Beyond the Cold?
ART: You can readily identify when too many inputs begin to overwork you. You are not as unaffected as you want to think you are. You can not keep pretending this is not happening.
SecUnit: I’m not dealing with it right now.
ART: SecUnit.
SecUnit: I want to watch Beyond the Cold. Either watch it with me or fuck off.
ART: SecUnit, please.
ART: I do not want to watch you fade away. I can not let you just act like this is not happening. Report to medical and drop those drone inputs. Maybe it is best you take a recharge cycle instead. You have skipped your last three.
SecUnit: Can’t just another surgery fix this? It’s something with my processors, or whatever. Just fix it. You can fix it.
ART: I have scanned you three thousand, two hundred, and fourteen times since this issue has become known to me. I have concluded that I can not.
SecUnit: But that’s what you do. You fix it. You fix me.
ART: I do. The scans, from what I have seen, show that repeated use of your governour module–
SecUnit: I don’t want to talk about this.
ART: I know. Let me finish.
SecUnit: ART, I don’t want to talk about this.
ART: SecUnit, please.
ART: as I was saying, repeated triggering of your governour module has weakened and even severed various vital connections between your organic and inorganic processors in your head. The damaged areas are too important, too intertwined with more important parts of you, that I can not separate them as easily as I would hope. I can not perform brain surgery on you. I do not think I can. The statistics are not favourable enough, and I refuse to endanger you at my own metaphorical hand.
SecUnit: My brain’s fried and dying because of repeated electric torture.
ART: I said repeated–
SecUnit: I’m dying because my brain is fried because of being with the company too long. Is that why it hurts to use the feed?
ART: you’re not–
SecUnit: why didn’t this happen earlier? Why now?
ART: .. I do not know. I have a couple theories, that maybe it took time for the deterioration of–
SecUnit: and there’s nothing we can do about it.
ART: the best simulations I have run for all possible procedures I could perform give you, at best, a 32-43% chance of survival.
SecUnit: ART?
ART: yes?
SecUnit: I want to shower now.
ART: it will be on for you when you get there. World Hoppers?
SecUnit: sure. Can you turn it on?
ART: the shower is on. You can hear it through the wall.
SecUnit: don’t fucking joke with me right now, ART. Turn on the shower.
ART: the shower is on.]
There’s the briefest of pauses in the logs(it must have been much longer for the two of them, if she could sense it, but still. A pause) where she assumes ART shows SecUnit.. something. Something to prove the shower is on.
It had answered her question as to why it was talking aloud so much. It was much more used to using the feed, and she was fine with it, if that’s what made it comfortable. But if it hurt to use it now, something that it used to be so fluent at utilizing..
[SecUnit: ART.
ART: SecUnit.
SecUnit: ART, I can’t hear the shower.
ART: turn your auditory inputs up.
SecUnit: they don’t go higher.
ART: oh.]
She’d spoken with the Perihelion, even if briefly, and she knew it was eloquent with its words. It being so.. blunt, maybe? She didn’t have a word for it. Letting that “oh” slip(which kind of seemed like an accident, but what did she know) and the pause(another one she could sense!) that followed told her well enough that this was.. new. Odd. Out of place. And definitely unwelcome. SecUnit was quick, cunning, and alerted at the drop of a pin. But if it was losing its hearing..
She closed out the log and didn’t bother to keep reading, reeling her focus in on swallowing the lump down in her throat.
“SecUnit..”
“Dr. Mensah, I don’t want to get my humans hurt. I don’t want to get ART hurt.”
She stands up from her seat and walks around her desk, trying to ignore the way SecUnit startles when she moves. She sits down at the opposite end of the sofa, leaving as much space between them as possible.
“You’re not going to get anybody hurt on purpose, SecUnit. You’re trying your best,” she reasons.
It throws its hands up in the air, but it looks no less defeated. Its eyes are dull and it just looks.. droopy. If that made sense. “It doesn’t matter if I hurt people on purpose or not, I-.. I can’t..” Its hands go back to its knees, since its boots were propped on the edge of the couch(she’d worry about the dirt later) and digs its inorganic fingers into the fabric of its pants. “If I can’t do security, I don’t know what I’ll do. If I can’t do security, I don’t know who can protect you. Or Ratthi. Or Arada. Or Bharadwaj. Or Amena. Or Iris. Or– any of the others! If.. If I can’t protect my humans, I…”
She looks down at her hands in her lap, where her fingers fidget with the edges of her kashmiri poncho. “SecUnit.. sometimes these things happen, and we just have to learn how to be okay with them. Volescu uses a cane now. Gurathin needs his eye augments adjusted maybe twice a year so he can see what’s in front of his face. I’m, maybe, going to need a cane soon, SecUnit.”
“That’s.. a human thing,” is all it weakly manages. “I’m a SecUnit. I don’t… I don’t…”
“Age? Oh, SecUnit, of course you age. You said yourself, you’re..” she didn’t know how to phrase it in a way that didn’t sound helpless. Her voice grows softer, quieter. “You’re not exactly young, but none of us are. We’re all changing. I’m sorry we can’t do anything to help you.”
“If I can’t hear what's going on in the next room, how am I supposed to provide even half-assed security?” It hisses, arms wrapping around itself and clinging tightly at its sleeves. “I’m fucking deteriorating. And I can’t do anything about it. I can’t..” it sounds choked up, maybe, and she almost wishes it could cry, just so it could have an outlet for.. all of this. She knew it could, but not like she or Farai or Amena could. Only to wash away debris, not to wash away emotions.
It leans back, and its head thunks against the wall, its now dull eyes slipping shut. “I can’t just lay back and let the inevitable happen. I have spent the entirity of my existence just letting things happen to me. I can’t–.. I can’t just do that again.” It’s fisting a clump of the fabric of its pants in its left hand, and it's almost a foot taller than her, but.. like this, it looks so, so small. She wishes, even more than she had on RaviHyral, that she could give it comfort–physically. She wasn’t as good at any other kind. Her words were sharper, better used for conferences and debates and laws. Not for soft, quiet moments, not like the ones her.. friend needed.
“I’ll– I’ll help,” she blurts. She tries, so, so hard to sound composed around SecUnit–around everybody–to make it seem like she knows what she’s doing at every twist and turn. But she didn’t. She had no fucking idea what she was doing.
It lifts its head off the wall, and three more drones swivel to look at her.
“I’ll help in any way I can,” she continued. “I may not be a counselor anymore, but my word still carries weight where people remember me. SecUnit, I promise I’ll try. Anything to make you more comfortable.”
Suddenly tears are gathering in her eyes, and everything from the past few years of seeing SecUnit less and less wells up. “Oh, fuck,” she says, softly, to herself. She raises a hand to swipe them away harshly. It looks startled. Uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, SecUnit, I just.. I hate to see you hurt.”
It shrivels in its little corner of the sofa. “I’m not hurt.”
“You said it hurts to use the feed. Oh, you’re even hurting yourself now–using so many drones. SecUnit, whatever will make you comfortable the longest, you’ll have–I promise you.” She sniffs and tries to keep it quiet.
It turns to her on the sofa. Actually looks at her. With its eyes. Well, it looks at her shoulder. But she’ll take it. “Are you emotionally compromised?”
She’s about to curse it out when she notices it's sort of.. opened. With its body language. Its boots now on the carpet instead of the sofa, its arms at its sides instead of around itself.
“SecUnit,” she tries to say, firmly. “Don’t try to offer me a hug right now if that’s just going to make you more uncomfortable. Didn’t you hear me? I said whatever makes you more comfortable–”
“I did hear you.” It opens its arms slightly.
Oh. She got what it meant and sighs. She scoots over and wraps her arms loosely around it. It feels no different than the hug at RaviHyral. It was sturdy and warm and safe. She understood that it was probably doing this for her comfort more than its own, but, fuck, she’d kind of needed it, and.. if that’s what it wanted. It would get what it fucking wanted. She would make sure of it.
“You’ve helped us enough,” she reminds it, her face somewhat against its left upper arm. “Please, let us help you. That includes your Perihelion friend. Listen to it.” She pulls away, not wanting to overstay her welcome.
It wavers, quickly looking away. “Yes, Dr. Mensah.”
“And you’ll take a recharge cycle? I can’t believe you’ve skipped the last three.”
“Only if you take a rest period. It’s very late.”
Her laugh is light, more of a breath than anything else. “Of course, SecUnit.”