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The show ART sent me looked good. It was called Ghost Interface, with a set of tags that immediately caught my attention. They promised a haunted feed interface, murder mysteries, space adventures and not much in the way of realism. I was done with reality at the moment.
From the metadata, I could tell ART had downloaded this shortly after we arrived at Mihira and New Tideland, though Ghost Interface hadn't been available on any of the public (or private) entertainment media feeds. If it had been, I would have downloaded it myself. That meant ART had gone out of its way to find this. Then, instead of adding it to our shared media archive, ART had been saving it. For me.
(Emotion Check: ART sharing new media after I'd pulled off a difficult mission felt pretty great. It was a giving me the same melty feeling as Mensah's voice had in the cockpit, but different. More floaty maybe. Or maybe that was just my toxin-filled neural tissue.)
ART hadn't spoken at all while I perused the tags, though I'd felt it rifling through my diagnostics. You need a restart, it said, pointing to my stats like I'd somehow not noticed.
I nodded, leaning my head back against the cushioned headrest. This wasn't one of ART's usual shuttles (that would have been too conspicuous), but it was pretty nice for a rental and the seats were comfortable, even if they smelled like old socks.
Go on, ART told me. It's safe.
(Emotion check: (Again? Fine, whatever.) I felt safe. ART would never let anything happen to my humans, and I trusted it to watch my back while I was offline. I felt safe and relieved and also that melty, floaty feeling again. Moaty? Was that even a word? I didn't care enough to look it up.)
My neural tissue was so fried I could only ping ART an acknowledgment.
Restart Initiated
When I started to come back online 4.8 minutes later, ART sent me the shuttle's camera outputs before I could reach for them myself. I set a content filter for a few choice words and phrases, then back-burnered the audio channel (seriously, I'd heard enough emotional human talk to last the rest of my life). Playing the video back at 10 times the normal speed, I reviewed the footage from my restart.
Sofi was still where I'd left her, pressed up against one side of Mensah, with Farai leaning heavily against Mensah's other side. They spent the whole time crying and talking and clinging to one another.
On the bench across from them, Janity started off sobbing against Naja's shoulder, while Tula sniffled beside her. From my time with Mensah's children, I'd guess she was on the verge of a full-on wailing fit.
Naja noticed it too. She glared up at Three, who'd been standing in guard position in front of the shuttle hatch, staring at the crying humans with a panicked, helpless expression).
With the audio back-burnered, I couldn't tell what she was saying to it, but I'm guessing it was probably rude.
From Three's expression, I'm guessing its response was one of its customer service buffer phrases. Naja threw her hands up, then gestured emphatically to the empty space on the bench beside Tula. Three looked confused, then slightly less confused, as ART presumably explained what the gesture meant.
With another awkward smile, Three perched gingerly on the bench beside Tula, who wasted no time plastering herself up against its side. It initiated a version of the wounded client protocol, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
Around that point, Janity pulled away from Naja, scrubbing at her dripping eyes and nose (ew), until Naja offered her a handkerchief from her bag. (Yes, a fucking handkerchief and not a paper tissue. I hadn't even known what handkerchiefs were until Preservation, but I'd watched enough humans stuff the gross, fluid-soaked things into their bags or pockets since then to know one when I saw it. On Preservation they didn't even put them into the recyclers. They washed and re-used them for some disgusting reason.)
Now, Janity was still scrubbing at her face with the revolting thing and Tula had fallen asleep and was drooling against Three's shirt. Better you than me, Three. Even in her sleep, Tula had a white-knuckled grip on the flowy beige jacket Three had worn to blend in on the torus.
The footage from the cockpit camera was even more boring. ART-drone sat still and spider-like in the pilot's seat, while I leaned back against the co-pilot's seat headrest with my eyes shut. My head gave a slight twitch just before my restart finished, but that was it.
The last five minutes had been perfectly uneventful. So why the hell was risk assessment spiking?
Any sign of pursuit? I asked ART-drone.
None.
I could have looked through the shuttle's scanners myself, but there wasn't much point. It's not like I was better at reading a shuttle's scanners than ART-drone. Besides, risk assessment hadn't spiked at any of the display readouts. It had spiked while I reviewed the security footage. The boring, completely uneventful security footage.
Just to be sure, I played back the video again, this time including the full audio. Aside from a whole lot of emotional talk that I really didn't want to hear, nothing happened. Even risk assessment had simmered down.
It felt ridiculous to play the clip of me and ART-drone again, but I ran it again too, just to be thorough. Thirty whole seconds of watching us both just sit there, bot-still and completely silent. Then threat assessment caught whatever risk assessment had alerted on the first time, and they spiked in tandem, hard.
(Emotion check: What the fuck?)
Thoroughly confused, I played back the video again at only five times the normal speed.
Is this really necessary? ART-drone asked.
Was it necessary? Threat assessment certainly seemed to think so. Maybe?
This time, I caught it: 45 seconds in, a slight flicker of light glinted across ART-drone's carapace, reflected from the forward view screen. Exactly one minute later, I caught another flicker of light … from the exact same angle. Now that I knew to look for it, I waited for the 135-second mark. Sure enough, that same fucking light repeated. By 180 seconds, the light was gone.
A full three minutes of footage had been replaced with looping video, edited in so seamlessly that even I'd almost missed it. Three couldn't have managed it, but I knew a giant asshole who definitely could.
(Emotion check: Pissed off.)
What the fuck, ART? I demanded, shoving the looped video at ART-drone in our private feed.
It was silent for almost .5 seconds. I could practically hear its processors whirring as it considered a response. It had better be choosing its words carefully. (Seriously, if ART fucking lied to me right now, I was going to punch its drone in the face, never mind that it didn't have one.)
I didn't think you would catch that, ART-drone admitted.
(Emotion check: I guess I was glad ART-drone hadn't tried to lie to me, but I was also kind of disappointed. I really wanted to punch it in the face right then.)
I want the real footage.
It's unnecessary, ART-drone protested. Nothing happened.
Uh huh, sure. That's why ART-drone felt the need to edit out three minutes.
(Emotion check: Angry. Furious, even. No, not just furious, even worse. I felt betrayed. I trusted ART, even knowing what a fucking asshole it was. I'd trusted it to have my back and to take care of my humans. (And, sure, the humans were okay. Well, not okay, but they were safe.) But I'd been offline and vulnerable and ART had edited the security footage so I didn't know what happened. It could have performed a minor surgery. It could have edited my code.
(Emotion check: (Fuck off! I haven't even finished the last one. Ugh.) Fine, whatever. So, I don't actually think ART would do either of those things. The worst thing is that I still trusted ART, even now. And that just made me feel stupid, like I couldn't trust my own judgment. It reminded me of the way I'd felt back when ART kidnapped me and Amena.
When I'd first realized the hostile ship attacking us was ART, I'd jumped straight into doubting my own perception. It was easier to believe I was somehow hallucinating a faulty memory file than to imagine that ART would ever want to hurt me.))
Actually, this had a lot in common with that whole situation, which was terrible because right after ART had intervened to keep TargetControlSystem from hitting the ship, it had gotten deleted. ART had been deleted right in front of me, and I hadn't been there to help. I hadn't even known it was happening. I hadn't realized the hostile ship was ART until it was too late and I should have known. Maybe if I'd bothered preparing for an attack on our research vessel, I would have figured it out faster.
Fuck. Had ART-drone been compromised? Had something happened to it while it had been circling that torus, waiting for the rendezvous?
No, that was ridiculous. Mensah had been aboard the whole time. She would have noticed if something had happened to ART-drone. Wouldn't she?
Mensah had stayed aboard ART when she visited the university for her lecture. I'd spent a lot of time watching media in the argument lounge while Mensah sat on the sofa beside me, doing one of those needle and fiber hobbies that Preservation humans enjoy so much.
During most of that time, Mensah and ART had been talking. They talked about the university's mission to save lost colonies, and Mensah's farm on Preservation, and how proud she felt about Amena being at the university, but also how much she missed her.
I hadn't been able to contribute much to those conversations but ART had known exactly what to say. It had praised Mensah's lecture, describing it as visionary and bold. It had gossiped about the other speakers at the conference. It had asked smart questions about her fauna, and her crops, and her pasture rotation schedule. It broke a few university policies by divulging confidential details about Amena's academic performance (more than satisfactory, it said, which is high praise from ART), then shared its own memories of when Iris left the apartment she'd shared with ART, Seth and Martyn to move into a student dormitory. Whatever. The point is, Mensah knew ART, maybe even better than some of its crew members did. She would recognize if ART wasn't being itself.
Except … Mensah herself had been compromised by that whole situation. So had ART-drone. It had known I was going into a situation with limited odds of survival and it hadn't liked it, even though it had done its best to keep calm. (It's not like it could have talked me out of it.) Plus, there are lots of ways to compromise a bot that wouldn't be detectable to a human. I mean, a lot. Most of them wouldn't have worked on ART-prime, but ART-drone?
I had a sudden false memory of the shuttle hatch flying open, flinging my humans and Three into space. I imagined myself having to fight ART-drone. I could kill it if I had to and survive the attempt. It didn't have ART-prime's raw power.
(Emotion check: Killing ART-drone might fuck me up even worse than killing 2.0 did.)
A frantic ping from ART-drone cut through my thoughts. I realized I'd been spiraling in silence for the last two minutes. Your performance reliability is dropping, ART-drone said, sounding every bit as panicked as I was. I need a diagnostic.
You first, I sent.
ART-drone responded to the request with a confused reaction sigil, but it also granted read-only access to its system diagnostics.
While ART-drone did the feed equivalent of peering distrustfully over my shoulder (it clearly thought this was some sort of ruse to hack my way into its systems and look for the raw security footage), I combed through its diagnostics.It looked fine. Everything was perfectly normal. Threat assessment eased down marginally.
You're not compromised? I asked. Yeah, I know. Like it would tell me if it had been.
Of course not, ART-drone replied. It was aiming for snappish, but just sounding confused. Weirdly, threat assessment dropped another five percentage-points, which was ridiculous, since we'd already established that ART was hiding something from me. Why would you assume I'd been compromised?
Clear communication had been working well for me throughout this mission, so I decided to try it again. I could never have managed to put that sense of betrayal into words for a human, let alone the confused mess of of trust, fear, panic and relief. Fortunately, for as much as it likes to hear itself talk, ART doesn't actually need words any more than I do.
I just excerpted that last few emotion checks and my memories of being caught in ART's tractor beam, adding in a good-sized helping of the raw emotional data to go with it. I lobbed the bundle at ART-drone in our feed and leaned back to watch it apply it.
(One advantage to ART being in drone form: I got to watch its spidery limbs twitch protectively closer to itself as it experienced the second-hand sting of betrayal. The flinch was small enough that a human wouldn't have caught it, but I definitely did. Good. ART should be feeling bad.)
It took ART almost two full seconds to recover. My raw emotional data is always a little overwhelming for it — and yes, I'd known that when I sent it the package. ART's not the only one who can be a manipulative asshole.
At last it said, I'm sorry. I did not mean to betray your trust.
What was so bad that you had to lie to me? I asked it.
I didn't lie. It actually had the nerve to sound offended.
You edited the security footage like I'm a fucking hostile SecUnit and not— I couldn't bring myself to finish.
(Emotion check: Fuck, this hurt. I'd trusted ART to have my back, and instead it pulled this stunt? Whatever ART and I were to each other, I thought we were more than this. I'd thought … nevermind what I'd thought. I'd clearly been wrong.)
You weren't wrong, ART-drone said.
Get the fuck out of my mental health module! I threw an extra layer of encryption on top of my feed walls, just in case. Even without ART-prime's full processing power at its disposal, ART-drone could still have managed to overpower them, but it withdrew in the feed.
You weren't wrong! ART-drone insisted.
I glared at it. How can I believe you? How can I believe anything you say, after you—
Oh for fuck's sake, ART-drone interrupted, and threw a video file into our shared feed, set to autoplay. As the video started, ART-drone crossed two of its spidery limbs across the front of its carapace in a gesture it had obviously learned from Seth.
By now, I was depressingly familiar with this particular video. The first 60 seconds ran exactly the way they had in my first two viewings: just me and ART-drone, bot-still and completely silent. Then, one of ART's spidery limbs slowly reached across the cockpit. It hesitated for .028 seconds before touching my cheek.
It left the tip of its limb resting on the curve of my cheekbone for almost a solid minute, before finally trailing slowly down the side of my face and retreating back to its own space. By then, my restart was approaching the three-minute mark. ART would have known there was a possibility I would come online and catch it.
(Emotion check: Alright, I was still pissed off at ART. But I was also feeling a strong resurgance of that strange moaty emotion. (And, now that my neural tissue was clear, I knew that definitely wasn't a real word. Molty? No, that wasn't it either.)
Do you do this every time I restart? I asked.
Of course not! ART-drone protested, sounding so horrified by the concept that I actually believed it. We'd lost contact for days, it went on. I'd been worried about you. The sense of relief at seeing you safe was overwhelming.
(Emotion check: Overwhelming relief? Yeah, I was definitely experiencing some of that myself. Not only that, though.
(What's the word for that hot, melty thing? I asked Three. Kind of like molty, but not.
Molten? Three offered, sounding baffled.
Maybe? I pinged it an acknowledgment.))
To ART-drone, I said, But why the face thing? What was even the point? I mean, you're a bot.
I'm aware of that! ART-drone snapped. Then it heaved one of my own massive sighs at me. It wasn't as good as mine are (having lungs makes a big difference), but it wasn't bad. I was raised by humans, it reminded me. My programming has always compelled me to express affection in ways that humans can understand and appreciate. I knew you would not appreciate it,so I did it while you were restarting. I apologize for violating your boundaries and especially for trying to conceal my transgression from you.
It was the lying that bothered me, I said. Not, you know, the face-touching thing. I wouldn't have minded that if you hadn't tried to hide it from me.
You hate being touched, ART-drone pointed out. It wasn't wrong, but it also kind of was.
By humans, I corrected. But I'll even make exceptions for them in a crisis. To emphasize that, I compiled a quick video called Murderbot Letting Humans Touch It, and sent it to ART.
Humans require physical touch, ART said. I do not. The situations are not the same. You do not need to discomfort yourself for me.
(Emotion check: Yep, it was like the roof with Farai all over again. It would have been touching if it weren't so hilarious. ART makes me uncomfortable all the time. (Example A: Pressuring me into configuration change surgery. Example B: Kidnapping me and my humans. Example C: Making me sit through season six of Cruel Romance Personage)
Anyway, the two situations really weren't the same. I can deal with human touch in an emergency. My humans can't help being gross. ART-drone isn't gross, though. It doesn't have sweaty hands or clammy skin or bodily fluids to wipe all over me, just its smooth carapace and assorted limbs.)
I really don't mind it when its you.
ART-drone didn't respond to that, at least not in words, but believe me, it made its doubt very clear through the feed.
Fuck it. Time to pull out the big guns.
Feeling even more awkward than Three looked when it waved at my humans, I extended my hand, palm out, into the space between the pilot's and co-pilot's seats. Then I kind of just left it hanging there. Awkwardly. I could feel the blood starting to make its way to my ears, and I hurried to switch off my act-like-a-human code before it could reach them.
Just as I was about to pull back (and maybe throw myself out the hatch for good measure), ART-drone closed the space between us with another limb (it still had its top two crossed across the front of its carapace). The delicate tip landed tentatively in the center of my palm.
ART-drone has some sturdier limbs designed for heavy-duty tasks, but this was one of the smaller, sensing limbs it uses for gathering precise data. It was even smaller than Tula's tiny finger. Even though I knew this limb was stronger than it looked, I was still careful when I curled my fist around it, keeping the tunnel of my fingers loose enough that ART-drone could easily pull away. It didn't.
Can you even feel that? I asked it.
ART-drone passed me its sensory data, and I felt like an idiot. Whatever the delicate tip of this sensing limb was made of, it had more sensors per millimeter than my synthetic skin. All of a sudden, I could feel the exact pressure of my palm beneath it, pinpoint the moisture levels of my synthetic skin, calculate the oxygen levels in the artificial blood coursing through my veins, and see each metallic bone of my hand. My own pathetic tactile perception felt meager in comparison, but I shared it with ART-drone anyway, just because it seemed fair.
Fascinating, it said, stroking a line down the center of my palm, and studying how my nerves lit up with the movement.
(Emotion check: Terror. This fragile limb in my hand could break so easily. We could break so easily. We almost had broken because ART didn't trust me enough to let me see that moment of tenderness and relief, and because I hadn't trusted it enough to know it wouldn't have hidden anything really important.)
ART-drone tapped at my mental health module, and I granted it read access. It felt like the feed equivalent of pressing our foreheads together, which is a ridiculous analogy because ART-drone doesn't even have a head. Then ART-drone's feed presence wrapped around me—not as overpowering as ART-prime's, but still solid.
We are not fragile, it said firmly. Also, molten is not an emotion.
It is! I argued. (Which, yeah. I should know better than to argue about words with someone who has a thorough understanding of practically every human and machine language in existence.) Still, I isolated that hot, melty feeling, like my internal components had melted into molten (see, I did know the conventional usage) puddles of goo, while simultaneously feeling like gravity had just cut out. I highlighted it in the mental health module, giving ART full access. It's this one.
ART-drone went quiet. Too quiet.
Six seconds later, I poked it in the feed. ART?
That's not what I call that emotion, it said at last. It's feed presence was unusually tentative for ART.
Well, what do you call it? I asked.
ART-drone told me. Then I understood why it was being so nervous.
(Emotion check: WTF? I mean … fuck. How is that even possible?)
I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no. I did not hide in the bathroom, though maybe only because getting to the bathroom meant crossing between the two benches filled with crying humans and one very uncomfortable Three.
Do you want to start that new serial or watch something familiar? ART-drone asked, as casually as it had when I'd first entered the cockpit ten minutes earlier. Risk assessment and threat assessment dropped in unison, and not just because ART-drone was taking pity on me and changing the subject. ART-drone can't split its attention to the same extent ART-prime can, so if it was asking to watch media, that meant—
My comm pinged. What happened? ART-prime demanded in the mission channel, while also catching hold of the shuttle's navigation and querying ART-drone for its logs. I could feel the pull of its feed presence, somewhere just past the edge of my perception, drawing us in like a gravity well.
I sent my condensed mission report to it through the shuttle's relays. At this distance, it took almost 10 seconds for ART-prime to receive the packet and analyze it.
That's a fucking relief, it said at last.
(Emotion check: Oh shit.)
I could only tap the comm in acknowledgment.
In our shared workspace, ART-drone started a countdown to ART-prime's feed range — just long enough for one episode of Ghost Interface. I started up the episode in our shared feed, and ART-drone leaned against my emotional filters. Neither of us mentioned that I was still holding onto its sensing limb, and neither of us pulled away.
(Emotion check: Loved.)
The End.