Chapter Text
I have enough practice at dismissing the violent responses of my programming that it takes barely 0.0001 seconds of my attention away from the hack Ruoye and I are performing as I walk towards Port LightBearer’s TowerBell-branded construct storage facility when a human (Feed ID: Keri, she/her) trips over her own feet and spills her hot beverage on my person. It’s coffee, so it could be worse, and it’s not even the expensive kind, so that’s even better.
I wouldn’t be resorting to burglary (robbery if you want to get technical about it; I’m a CombatUnit, so I’m always armed) if I had the money to buy what I needed. Even though I can’t eat and therefore don’t need to buy food, it’s surprising how high the price of CombatUnit fluids can get – so high that I don’t bother with them anymore and just go straight for SecUnit supplies. I can’t even afford a new set of clothing. The ones I have were originally completely white, but unless you’re looking closely, a human or augmented human wouldn’t be able to tell that a majority of the tie-dye-esque patterning is actually just the remnants of my fluids that Ruoye’s washing facilities couldn’t quite get out.
I smile apologetically at Keri; an expression that has been immensely helpful for the past 120,000 or so hours. Her face is pinched in that heartbreaking way I’ve come to expect from those living in the Corporation Rim. She’s subconsciously logged me as an augmented human, which is what I usually go for, but which is also cause for concern if it were true. That amount of liquid (a whole cup) on augments, whether it does damage or not, is likely grounds for a court case, something she (judging by the bags under her eyes and the panicked rise in her heart rate) can’t afford.
Luckily for her, I’m not an augmented human; I’m a customised, specialised, BaiWu-branded Combat Security Unit, and part of my customisations involved skin-like coverings for any important circuitry or joints that water damage would ruin, and more in other places for purely aesthetic reasons. Any repairs I would need if she’d damaged me would likely cost more than she ever had earned or ever would earn in her life. Luckily, not only am I legally considered “lost property” and therefore solely the responsibility of BaiWu CEO Jun Wu, I’m also my own person, and I’m not about to demand she starve to pay for my repairs. Which, to reiterate, I don’t need.
“S-sorry,” Keri says, half bowing in apology and half looking around for a napkin or cloth, like that could save my clothes from an artful brown stain trailing shoulder to wrist with a little on the upper leg for continuity. This might actually improve things. It’ll at least distract from the projectile weapon hole just above my elbow that I tried to patch up. CombatUnits, to no one’s surprise, were not built with sewing in mind, and Ruoye doesn’t have a recycler on board. Not that we could afford to run it as often as I would likely need to.
I wave my hands at Keri placatingly; something I’ve found to be a lot more effective with my gun ports hidden and all sharp implements concealed from sight. (I have a lot of sharp implements. My previous owners really went all out on expenses for my design.)
I see her give up on looking for something to help me clean up and catch the moment she resigns herself to grovelling in my mercy. I manage to catch her shoulders before she can bow any lower. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” I tell her, putting a little more breath than usual behind it to simulate slight laughter.
Constructs don’t breathe the same way humans and augmented humans do, so I always pay close attention to how I speak, hiding it as well as I can. I doubt anyone but another CombatUnit would have the detection software for something like that, but I do it mostly for my own peace of mind. I do a lot of things for my peace of mind these days. CombatUnit processing speed is usually about ten times that of a human; more in an active combat situation. I don’t know what mine is, but I know it’s faster.
I have a lot of room to think. Sometimes, I wish I didn’t.
I’m on a time crunch. I can’t afford to waste even a few more seconds on this, but with how much attention it’s attracted (cleaner bots coming to mop the spill; Keri’s apologies; my general dampness) I can’t make a quick enough getaway. I can feel Ruoye darting in and out of the edges of my feed as I reassure Keri that no, I won’t sue her for this, none of my augments are damaged, no harm done, it’s okay. She looks like she might cry, so I steer her into a sheltered (but still public, since going somewhere private would be both suspect and uncomfortable) alcove to the side of the food and drink establishment we’d been standing in front of this whole time.
As the window for my latest SecUnit fluid heist in a long line of similar such occurrences gradually wanes, I can’t bring myself to be too worried. Ruoye and I are good for a month or so more as we are, so long as I don’t suffer any debilitating injuries between now and our next operation. It’ll be antsy about the dwindling supply, but it’s not something we haven’t dealt with before.
“Thank you,” Keri manages. She sniffs once to hold back her emotions.
“It’s really no trouble, don’t worry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Keri eyes me in bewilderment for a moment before she seems to come to a realisation. She looks me up and down, brows furrowed. I know what she’s about to say before she says it.
“You’re not from the Corporation Rim, are you? No one from the Rim would think like that. Hell, anyone else would’ve bled me dry in court and fucked off into the event horizon.”
I don’t wince externally. It’s a near thing, though. I laugh awkwardly instead.
I’m never sure what to say to this question. Actually, I am from the Corporation Rim, but they wouldn’t call me a person on account of the fact that I’m a construct and therefore property. No, I’m not from the Corporation Rim; my cultural understanding of the universe comes mainly from a planetary settlement that was decimated by war and disease and subsequently released from corporate control in the wake of the deaths of its leaders. Funny story, I don’t think I’ve ever really belonged anywhere but on an empty battlefield or a decommissioned gunship. Truth be told I don’t believe there’s a place for me in any of this, but I’m a selfish thing. If I search long enough there has to be some place I was made for because it certainly wasn’t Xianle. If it had been, then maybe they would have been right to fight under my command. Maybe they would have lived.
“I’m just not quite used to the way of things here,” I say, smiling gently. Half lie. Half truth. There’s no lie in the next part, though. “Sorry.”
Keri laughs, perhaps a little disbelieving. Her heart rate is back at baseline now.
Ruoye reminds me through our private feed connection that we have five minutes left to get in and out of TowerBell with the fluids. I send: HIED Protocol = ACTIVE; severity = MINOR; risk = MINIMAL; threat = NULL; postpone operation until further notice. Then, after a sheepish pause: Sorry. This is important.
Rouye doesn’t exactly tell me it understands (it doesn’t actually use the feed to talk, just to send emotional data and the occasional illustrative diagram), but the wave of fond exasperation is clear enough confirmation. I send it a smiling amusement sigil. It replies with an image of a human in neck deep water holding a domestic feline above their head. The domestic feline is entirely dry. I close the connection, but not before Rouye’s feed-laughter reaches my processors.
Ruoye’s fondness is reassuring in more ways than one, but mostly because… I wasn’t built for this. I was built to be a symbol, not a person. An aspiration entirely unachievable because it was never “achieved” to begin with. I was built to exact specifications down to the shade of brown in my eyes. There’s no one and nothing like me in the rest of the known universe, and I’ve never known whether I should be grateful for or resentful of that. I was built as a perfect weapon of beautiful destruction; an aesthetic annihilation for the hands holding my strings to wield. I was not made with choice in mind. In the face of this, and in the wake of everything I’ve ever experienced, I stand with my first and most true choice cupped in my hands: to be kind.
I developed HIED Protocol through meticulous study (HIED: human in emotional distress, companion to HIPD: human in physical distress, along with their bot equivalents: BIED and BIPD) and have come to the profound conclusion that it is impossible to build a single protocol for all situations under that umbrella. I hypothesised this going in, but it never hurts to be sure. Every time I use HIED, I add a new branch to the decision tree. It’s of no practical help, but to me, it means everything. I keep the branches of HIED (and the other protocols, but especially HIED) in one of the most secure corners of my processing space, right next to my name, and the video, audio, sensory and emotional data of saving Hong’er. It’s a map of everything I was never built to be, and a monument to everyone I chose to help. Even if I could not save them all. Even if I should have been able to. A tapestry spanning 175,000 hours of freedom, and a celebration of what I chose to do with it.
Ruoye understands. I don’t ask it about the blood it’s spilled. In return, it doesn’t ask me. We leave the silence cradled between us like a child. We take turns calming it when it cries.
After a somewhat awkward conversation (I offer to pay for another coffee; Keri refuses, then offers to buy me a coffee, which I have to politely decline on account of my lack of a digestive system, leaving us at a stalemate of generosity before she finally backs down) Keri is back on her way to the ship she’d come to Port LightBearer to catch. Seeing as I’m not going to get anything else done wandering the port, I head to Ruoye’s docking bay. We have about fifteen minutes before we’ll be cleared for departure.
While walking, I take the time to run my standard search code through the feed for our real names and various aliases. Nothing. That’s good. I pull up the visuals for the dock cameras and start flicking through them. We can—
I stop.
There’s a BaiWu ship. Docked at Port LightBearer. On this station.
There’s a BaiWu ship on this station.
I take a deep breath I don’t need. (As deep a breath as my CombatUnit lung will allow me, anyway.) I start walking again. I feel myself drifting into memories I’d prefer not to think about.
I walk faster.
Ruoye must sense my distress, because it opens its airlock for me before I even tap our feed connection to let it know about my approach, perfectly timing it so I don’t have to break my stride as I head directly for my bed (a luxury that still hasn’t lost its wonder, but one that I can’t fully appreciate right now). I land face down in a position that would be suffocating for a human but that is just mildly uncomfortable for me. Ruoye presses against me in the feed, radiating concern and question and an endless stream of Friend! Friend! Friend! until I give it the feed equivalent of a pat on the head. It preens.
My owners are here, I say before I can stop myself.
Ruoye projects a feeling that comes across like defensive hissing in the feed, reaching out to take the camera inputs I picked up, trying to see where the BaiWu personnel have gone; trying to figure out if they saw me. I let go with some reluctance, but more relief. I’m confident in Rouye’s ability to alert on any concerning activity, and besides, I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to think about what they’d do to me if they caught me.
Being a customised one-of-a-kind CombatUnit has its perks in that none of my specs raise immediate red flags and my cloned human tissue is legally restricted to the single instance unit that is me. It also means that I am an entirely recognisable entity to anyone who knows my face.
Everyone who has ever worked for BaiWu knows my face.
I scrub myself from any cameras I appear on, but I have a protocol that’s going to be trouble if anyone on that company ship accesses their logs before I leave Port LightBearer. After a particularly hairy operation that lost Ruoye a precious (fully functioning) fuel cell, I only scrub station cameras on exit. (The station’s human camera operator happened to notice that a person who was physically present on the station did not appear on camera where they should be, and subsequently brought the full force of Station Security to bear on Ruoye and I.) Suffice to say, despite relatively minimal risk of a repeat, I no longer scrub station cameras as I go. I’m still on the feeds, public to anyone who knows how to look, and if anyone would, it would be BaiWu. They’re the ones who taught me how.
Of course, then, the station alarm goes off.
I sit bolt upright, already reaching under my shirt for the blade hidden in my right side’s seventh rib and preparing the inorganics in my legs for speed as I take up battle stance in the middle of my room. At the same time, I scan the feed for the source of the alert.
It’s the BaiWu ship. They’re reporting an attempted systems sabotage. Luckily for them, they caught it just before the malware got to their life support.
I feel Ruoye creeping into our shared feed space with about a terabyte more information than it had during our previous conversation. Risk Assessment spikes.
“Ruoye,” I say. Annoyance, resignation, panic, anger, and a traitorous swirl of vindication melt into incomprehensibility in my mind. “Tell me you didn’t.”
Ruoye doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t need to.
I go immediately into crisis mode. I want to sink into the comfort of personhood, but right now, every second of emotional response is a second wasted. We need to leave, now.
“How long until we’re scheduled to launch?”
Ruoye throws me the newest stationwide alert: no arrivals or departures until the source of the sabotage is found. This station is more thorough in their security than most populated planets I’ve been to. Damn it.
I take the camera inputs back from Ruoye, picking up the ones in our docking bay at the same time. There’s no one approaching us yet, but that won’t hold for long. I replace my rib, stand up straight, and start striding towards Ruoye’s airlock.
Port LightBearer’s docking policy involves locking a ship to the station with industrial strength clamps that will not release until that ship’s scheduled departure time. I realise, as I step out into the docking bay, that I could hack the departures to make it so that Ruoye is scheduled to leave now. But, any further interference with station systems will only leave more trails to follow back to us (which is why I don’t bother trying to scrub myself from the cameras now), so I go ahead and start on Plan A: the guns built into my arms.
First order of business: I turn the power of my energy weapons down to my standard welding intensity, aim them each at the base of the dock’s airlock, and fire a smooth line along the entire seam of the door. It takes an agonising five minutes to complete, plus another two to cool. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but Risk Assessment will be pleased with me when I move to step two.
By the time I’m stepping back aboard, Ruoye is growing increasingly anxious. I’ve been monitoring the cameras with it coiled around my shoulders in the feed, watching as Station Security make their rounds, starting from the BaiWu ship. Lucky for us, it’s far enough away and the station is sparsely populated enough that we have another five or so minutes before someone spots the welded airlock and the cavalry come running. Ruoye sends a general sense of HURRY, HURRY, HURRY in its ship-wide feed (essentially our private feed since we’re the only two still alive who can access it). I ping it in acknowledgement.
I seal the inner airlock before flexing the inorganics in my legs, anchoring myself to the wall with the EVA tether and to the floor with avian-like talons that emerge from my heels.
I really should have taken my shoes off before this. Oh well.
Holding Rouye’s outer airlock door open as little as I can get away with, I fire my right energy weapon at full power, directly at one of five clamps that secure ships to the dock.
I feel a breeze stir gently as air begins to drain from the artificial atmosphere. A new alert appears on the station feed. I dismiss it before I even do a scan. Faintly, I can hear footsteps running to our docking bay. Well, it’s too late now.
Clamps two and three go just as the first did; one full power blast to the right component and they’re forced to disconnect. I watch through the cameras as Station Security attempts to open the docking bay door, only to realise that they can’t. As I take aim at clamp four, a BaiWu employee (high on the food chain judging by the quality of his clothes) barges past Station Security to peer angrily through the porthole on the door, likely to try and yell at the reckless idiots who decided to hack his ship. He sees me, goes to open his mouth, then stops.
He recognises me.
I freeze. CombatUnits don’t freeze, but since when have I listened to what CombatUnits can or can’t do? Ruoye bristles in the feed as I slowly turn my head, even though everything but morbid curiosity is begging me to just fire my energy weapon and be done with this whole mess.
He’s clean, I find myself thinking, because that’s what stands out about him the most to me. I’ve spent most of my operational period in conditions varying from “suboptimal” to “really fucking bad”, so cleanliness is something I consider a luxury. I try to keep myself tidy, but I don’t remember a time earlier than 175,000 hours ago when some system or other didn’t grate with the dirt stuck in the joints. This man is pale-skinned, clean shaven, and sporting a businesslike seriousness that carries from his dress to his carefully combed hair. He’s handsome, too, from what my rudimentary scans of his face are showing. The model Corporate Rim employee.
His eyes are filled with rage.
I make precisely 0.52 seconds of direct eye contact with the BaiWu employee through the porthole as one final groan of metal sounds out. The vacuum of space slams Ruoye’s outer airlock shut and swallows the air between us, launching us both out into the void.
Three wormhole jumps and one pitstop later (to scavenge a new pair of shoes and top up our fuel), Ruoye is still trying to convince me not to go down to a planet. It keeps leaving pleading amusement sigils in our shared feed space like a sad peace offering, but I don’t let its manipulations get to me.
Don’t be like that, I tell it. It wilts in the feed. A pang of sympathy worms its way into my non-existent heart, but I will myself onwards as I pass through planetary customs to the shuttle bay, bypassing the weapons scanners as I go. This is time for you to think about what you’ve done. You may be a gunship, and you may have malware, but you haven’t learned subtlety. What you did was reckless, and would have cost us the TowerBell fluids if we hadn’t already abandoned the operation. I pause, then add, If you want to do something like that in the future, you have to tell me, okay?
Ruoye echoes skepticism in my general direction. I send it a smiling amusement sigil and drop the connection with the feed equivalent of a parting pat on the head.
To Rouye’s credit, it has been appropriately apologetic since I deemed us sufficiently in the clear and we dropped out of crisis protocol. Nevertheless, I told it immediately that I would be taking my next security consultation and investigation job on a planet as opposed to on a station. Ruoye dislikes planetary deployment (not the right word, but a lot of my language codes still operate on what my Xianle programming taught me, so it’s what I’m more comfortable with, terminology-wise), mostly because of its (admittedly understandable) attachment issues. It hates me being away from it for long, but at least on a station it’s within feed range. Due to the distance and some damage to its systems I haven’t been able to fix, this is not possible on a planet.
It’s necessary, though. Rouye put me in danger with this latest stunt, and it knows that. That’s why it hasn’t put up more of a fight, and why it didn’t comment on my contract selection while I browsed the Apphia planetary feed, or when I selected a week long contract to a remote village at the base of a mountain called Yu Jun. I need the space and so does Ruoye. It can handle things up on the station; monitor the feed for information from Port LightBearer and alert if it makes it out this far.
Apphia is a remote planet on the edge of the Corporation Rim, one step above “backwater” to corporates. It’s reportedly similar enough to the human homeworld that it needed minimal terraforming and is a popular destination for families recently released from contract labour. It seems nice enough, though I can’t personally see the appeal. There is at least less sand than there was on Xianle, but it doesn’t make that much of a difference to me; I wouldn’t be able to stay somewhere with so few construct repair facilities for long.
The job was posted by the entire village collective, which was what first caught my eye. Most of the other listings were events, businesses, or jobs that looked like a front for something or other that I didn’t have the energy to involve myself in, even though I was itching to take them apart. The village had pooled their resources to pay for either a private investigator or a security consultant, both of which I had enough experience with to qualify.
Women had been going missing from the village. They had customs not unlike Xianle, where a bride would be carried in a palanquin by selected groomsmen up the mountain road to near the peak, and the ceremony would be carried out there in accordance to their spiritual beliefs (closer to the heavens that way, to bring good fortune to the newlyweds).
In the past year, seventeen brides and their bridal processions had gone missing on the road, between the village and the altar where marriage ceremonies take place. The villagers tried to investigate it on their own but couldn’t find any traces left behind. Some thought it was the wrath of their gods brought to bear. Others thought there was a dangerous undocumented fauna population on the mountain. They all agreed that something needed to be done. So, here I am. Doing something.
On my way to the village on the planet’s rail network, I take the time to properly search the feed for information, so I know as much as I can get my metaphorical fingers on about what I’m getting into. I’m surprised to find that there have been fifteen additional weddings in the exact same location where all parties have come through the ceremony intact. Interesting. That makes a little over 53% of all weddings since the estimated time the phenomenon started happening that have had the bridal procession disappear. Records show significant variation in participants – young, old, first, second and third marriages. The village seems oddly rooted in tradition so most marriages are monogamous, but there are a few instances of multiple marital partners on both sides of the categorisation parameters I’ve established (missing versus not missing), so nothing there.
This is… really strange.
The train arrives at the foot of Mount Yu Jun with little fanfare. I grab my bag from the seat next to me and arrive at the doors just as they open onto the platform. It’s little more than a wood-and-steel block with a half gravel, half dirt path leading up the mountain, but I wasn’t really expecting much more. The contract wasn’t offering a particularly high payout. I suspect it was as high as the village could afford to go without risking their livelihoods. They’re reportedly almost entirely self-sufficient, aside from the occasional trader, but that's mostly for their power supply. They were working up to buying a solar grid for a more consistent local network. Paying for this contract will likely put them back decades.
As I’m looking around, I notice that there are two other people on the platform with me. The train wasn’t exactly crowded, but there was more than one carriage, so it stands to reason that the others could have been more crowded than mine, which only had one other person; an old woman with a small domestic canine that barked intermittently throughout the journey. I wasn’t exactly focused on that, even if I could have been. Apphia is quite beautiful; I’d been saving my visual inputs in a file to share with Ruoye later.
Both of the people are dressed mostly in worn brown clothes, aside from the shorter one’s boots, which look fairly new. Their feed profiles show them as Nan Feng, he/him, and Fu Yao, he/it. Nan Feng is tall, broad in the shoulders; imposing. His hair is one degree away from an outright buzzcut, a natural dark brown that blends seamlessly with the rest of him. Fu Yao is three inches shorter with frosted white ends on shoulder length black hair, half of which is tied in a calculatedly messy bun to keep it out of his face. They seem like they’re having a tense conversation over the feed, but neither of them are subvocalising. I can’t see much of Fu Yao’s skin, but Nan Feng is obviously significantly augmented, even judging only by the metallic sheen coming from where Apphia’s star shines on the back of his neck.
I go to run a quick search of their names, get a 0.03 second blip of connection, then nothing. Ah, right. The train kept me connected while I was aboard, but it’s too far for that now. I’m on my own.
Well, nothing for it. I go to approach them. I get barely one step before Nan Feng’s profile vanishes for a tiny fraction of a second, unnoticeable to all but a CombatUnit, then all human micro-movements fall off him like water until he’s standing at attention before Fu Yao, who raises an eyebrow then spins on its heel, only to stop when it spots me. He and Nan Feng freeze. So do I.
I know that stance. I saw it every cycle for over 150,000 hours. I know it because I held myself similarly, and we used to compare the ways we stood over the feed, sending specs and analysis of the differences and ways they could be made more comfortable.
I know, also, the way the shocked face before me used to be constantly masked by a smile. How it would twist in disgust the second the three of us were alone.
I haven’t seen either of these people since the last of Xianle died under my watch.
“Taizi Dianxia?”
I allow myself a sheepish smile, then a small wave. “Hello, Mu Qing; Feng Xin.”
There’s a long stretch of silence. Well, long for a machine intelligence. 4.28 seconds is an eternity with a processing speed as fast as mine. To no one’s surprise, it’s Mu Qing who breaks it.
“Xie Lian, what the actual fuck are you doing here!?”