Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Have you ever spent much time with higher-level bots?” Bharadwaj asked me one day.

Prior to starting this conversation, she’d been fiddling with her feed interface and talking about the traffic, so the topic took me by surprise, to say the least. There were a lot of answers I could have given her; what I said was, “Not really.” That wasn’t untrue. “I didn’t exactly do a lot of socializing when I was with the company.” When you had to follow human orders, getting attached to other constructs or bots that could have conflicting orders was a bad idea. That knowledge was one of the pieces that my organic parts had hung onto through the memory wipe, and had been firmly reinforced by that one time my clients ordered me and another SecUnit to fight, gladiator-style, for their amusement.

Bharadwaj made a little thoughtful noise, finally having set her feed interface up to her satisfaction. “I see. I wondered because - well, I’ve been corresponding for a few months now with a professor located in another non-corporate polity. They research experimental bot development, and stumbled across a feed message I’d put out on some academic channels about my documentary. They asked recently if I was considering including any accounts from bots in my documentary, or if it would be exclusively about constructs.”

Huh. “Are you?” I asked. I couldn’t help but wonder what my friend ART would say if she did include bots in her subject matter. Not that it would ever see Bharadwaj’s documentary, probably, but the mental image of ART nitpicking its way through the whole thing, point-by-point, and complaining whenever any of the first-hand accounts were overly general or inaccurate was a vivid one. (ART has a lot more processing power and specialized code under the hood than most people even know that bots can have. Also, ART is a pedantic asshole.)

“Probably not, but… I’ve thought of making it a documentary series. The situations between constructs and bots are different, but the rules built for bots are often applied to constructs, so it’s difficult to detangle them completely.” Bharadwaj smiled a little. “I’ve picked a big topic to write about. But I’m getting off-topic, actually. I got another message from the researcher last night, and I wanted to see what you thought of it.” She forwarded the message to me over the feed.

I read it, and then frowned and read it again more slowly. With the salutation and small talk and other boring bits stripped out, it read:

Unfortunately, it seems like I won’t actually be able to send you the papers my lab has authored about the bots we’ve built. When I attempted to obtain authorization from the university to make them publicly accessible, I was informed that the information within them must remain classified. I’ve lodged an official protest, but that will take time to be processed and likely still not be successful. I have at least attached a few related papers; they’re not from my lab, but hopefully they’re still useful to you.

On a related note, thank you for the excerpt of the draft of your documentary; you may be glad to know that it sparked an animated discussion among our lab which I hope may bear fruit down the road. While I once again can’t share the details, as my most esteemed government has forbidden it, I think you would approve of the direction of it.

In fact - I know it’s a bit of a trek for you, but if you’d be willing to go a bit further afield for your research, you should consider coming to visit the university. Although I can’t send you my research, I can introduce you to the bots I work with and let them speak for themselves. They’re as interested in your documentary as I am, and they’d like to speak with you about it in person - as would I.

I could see why the message had caught Bharadwaj’s interest. I didn’t know exactly where this university was, but Preservation, as far as I could tell, was more or less in the middle of fucking nowhere, and it would probably take a couple of weeks of travel just to visit this university. So for this researcher to propose it anyway, just to talk to some bots, was a little weird.

“What do you think?” Bharadwaj asked.

“How often do universities usually have proprietary research?” I said.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Bharadwaj said. “It’s fairly contrary to the mission of any university, which is to share knowledge with its students, and, more broadly, the world. It’s possible for information to be difficult to share for logistical reasons, or for academics to choose not to share their research before publication out of fear of somebody stealing their ideas, but neither of those seem to be the case here.”

I looked back at the message. “They mentioned the government.” I don’t know a lot about the governments of non-corporate polities besides Preservation. Corporate governments love proprietary data, but that’s because corporations have never met a piece of data that they didn’t want to get their grubby little hands on to wring as much money out of as possible, so. Presumably most non-corporate polities didn’t, you know, do that. (Look, I don’t know anything about non-corporate polities that aren’t Preservation, okay?)

“Yes,” Bharadwaj said, “I noticed that too. In Preservation, the government only issues orders of data protection in unusual circumstances, when it’s needed to protect citizens’ wellbeing, or to keep Preservation safe from corporate predation, but I’m not sure how common of a stance that is.” She hesitated. “What do you make of the invitation?”

In The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, it would definitely be an invitation to quietly trade proprietary data, leading to retaliatory action from the governing corporation after a passerby who just happened to be wandering by overheard and reported it. (People in the media never took sufficient anti-surveillance measures, and got overheard for all sorts of stupid and easily-preventable reasons.) But my media was highly inaccurate to real life. This researcher might legitimately just want to introduce Bharadwaj to some bots. And even if they were actually inviting her to try and illicitly share proprietary material, Bharadwaj was sensible enough to refuse to take anything that would actually get her in trouble with the governing polity.

“It’s an invitation to go to a university and talk to some bots, what’s to make of it?” I said. Then the obvious reason behind Bharadwaj asking occurred to me. Oh, great. “Don’t tell me you’re actually thinking about going?”

“I’m considering it,” Bharadwaj said. “I set my own schedule these days, and I would very much like to speak with the bots they’ve been working with, if nothing else.”

I sighed. I like sighing at appropriate moments, and I think I’m pretty good at it at this point. “There are bots on Preservation.”

“True, but the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland has one of the most advanced programs in this section of the galaxy for the construction and study of higher-level bots!” Bharadwaj said, making one of those hand gestures she liked for emphasis.

I wasn’t listening anymore. The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, where did I -

Oh.

That was ART’s university.

I was so surprised that my body locked up and my performance reliability dropped five percent. I didn’t know what my face was doing, but Bharadwaj straightened and looked at me again, studying my face more intently. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said reflexively. My performance reliability was climbing back up, and I was thinking.

I’d never actually thought about trying to track ART down before. I had no idea what a social call to a giant spaceship that spent most of its time roaming the galaxy would look like. Even though ART knew what I was like and probably wouldn’t care what I said when I showed up as long as I brought new media for us to watch together, it still felt too awkward to imagine. Even thinking the words “social call” made my performance reliability drop two percent.

But I did know how to provide security for humans entering unknown and potentially hazardous situations.

Bharadwaj was still frowning at me. “Is there something wrong? Do you think it’s dangerous to go?”

“No,” I told her, “but I’m going with you anyway.”

It took Bharadwaj and I ten cycles to arrange the trip and set off on it. I’d thought that this would be a simple affair - buy ticket for transit, get on transit, there, you’re done - but apparently Bharadwaj had actual obligations that she needed to wrap up first.

And, weirdly, so did I. Mensah’s actual security needs were fairly minimal at this point, since the company had been successful enough at wiping GrayCris off the map that my threat assessment had dropped back to normal levels. That wasn’t what I was worried about, though. She hadn’t gotten the trauma treatments yet, even though she’d finally agreed to start them, and I knew she was still more comfortable when I was around for high-stress situations. We’d planned that I would go on Arada’s survey after she started the trauma treatment so she could “stand on her own feet again” or however she’d put it, but the survey wasn’t for another fifty cycles. I didn’t like the idea of vanishing on her with almost no advance warning, even if we’d planned on me vanishing for a while later.

When I went to talk to her about it, though:

Mensah’s eyebrows went up towards her hairline. “You’re coming, too?”

“I told Bharadwaj I was,” I said. “You’re coming?”

We were in her office, or her former office as of tomorrow. She didn’t have time to get the trauma treatment and be the planetary leader of Preservation, so she was stepping down as planetary leader, and now she had to vacate the offices associated with it. I wasn’t sure how she felt about it and didn’t know if I needed to ask. Normally I let the humans deal with the emotional support - Pin-Lee had even added it to the contract she’d negotiated for me for Arada’s survey - except I was pretty sure all the humans thought Mensah was already doing the trauma treatments. That meant the only one who knew that she was stepping down because of them was probably me.

I hadn’t decided whether I should ask her about it yet. Instead I was helping her clean her office. Well, I was sort of helping; I’d tried to put things away, but her sorting system confused me, so now I was mostly scowling down at the boxes and trying to figure out her organizational scheme, since I didn’t want to fuck up her filing system by accident. “Is it organized by subject? If it’s not in alphabetical order-”

“It’s not organized by subject, and I never said it wasn’t in alphabetical order,” Mensah said. I could hear the smile in her voice. “I am coming. When Bharadwaj told me about it, I decided to come along. I’m very interested in her documentary, and I thought that now that I won’t have planetary administrative work to be doing, perhaps I could spend more time assisting her with it.”

“Even though it’s off-planet?” I didn’t really hear the words until they left my mind, and then I grimaced. I didn’t want to imply that Mensah wasn’t capable of going off-planet without me, just…

Mensah narrowed her eyes a little at the drone I was using to look at her, but, when I didn’t say anything more, sighed. “Bharadwaj told me you’d done a security assessment and classified the trip as low risk, so I thought it might be a good time to test my limits. Yes, I know,” she said, in response to my look, which she caught out of the corner of her eye even though she wasn’t looking directly at my face. “It probably was too much too soon, but I don’t like being idle. So I can’t say I’m sorry that you’re coming along, it’s probably for the best. Though I can’t help but wonder - why are you coming along? If you think the trip is low-risk - you do think the trip is low-risk?”

“Yes,” I said, because I wasn’t about to lie to her, or any of them, about my threat assessments, even if it was an easier explanation than the truth. I opened my mouth to give her a reason why I was going.

Nothing came out.

This would have been the obvious opportunity to tell her about ART’s existence, except I didn’t want to tell her about ART, and I had no idea why. No, I don’t understand it, either. I had no reason not to tell her, except that it made my organic parts start to sweat when I thought about it.

“It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it,” Mensah said. “I’m sorry I pried.”

I minded the fact that I didn’t know what the fuck was happening in my own head a lot more than the fact that she was prying. “It’s fine. It’s… complicated, and I’m not sure how to explain it yet.” There, that was an at least acceptable non-explanation.

“All right,” Mensah said easily, and then, thankfully, changed the subject. “Gurathin said he would come along as well.”

Huh. “Gurathin? Why?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Gurathin was the most annoying of my humans. He didn’t like me, and the feeling was mutual, but I could, reluctantly, admit that his skill as a system analyst and his willingness to do things like back me up in arguments with Station Security had been an asset in the past. (To be fair, he might have just helped me with that argument because he liked to argue. He certainly argued with me enough.) But, fine, at least I knew how to work with him and could trust him not to do anything too stupid in a dangerous situation.

“He’s been doing some research of his own as a long-term follow-up to some of the data he gathered on our last survey,” Mensah said. “FirstLanding university doesn’t have much data that’s relevant for him, but apparently the university of Mihira and New Tideland has a more comprehensive collection.”

Apparently my expression was dubious again, because Mensah flicked a brief glance at my face, looked away again towards my drone, and sounded like she was biting back a smile when she said, “Sometimes research does require travel, you know.”

I did know that. “It’s inefficient and more dangerous than getting materials shipped to you,” I grumbled. “I do know about inter-library shipments.” But the whole reason this trip was happening was because data transfer across different polities was sometimes politicized and fraught, so I understood perfectly well there were limits to its value. Before Mensah could point that out, I said, “Fine, I give up. Explain your filing system to me.”

Anyway, ten cycles passed from my initial discussion with Bharadwaj, and then Bharadwaj, Mensah, Gurathin, and I boarded a transport on route to the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Well, strictly speaking we boarded three transports consecutively; there weren’t any direct trips there, because Preservation is not exactly a bustling center of commerce. But the trip was, thankfully, boring for the most part; the most exciting thing that happened was Bharadwaj nearly losing half her luggage on the second transfer station, so I had a lot of time to watch media while we traveled.

I’d prepared with a lot of new downloads, enough to more than cover the entire trip. But somehow, when it came time to exit from the wormhole for the final time, I ended up sitting in my cabin and watching episode 267 of Sanctuary Moon for the twenty-fifth time instead. Yes, I know. But when we’d been on the second transit station and Bharadwaj had been arguing with Station Security about her luggage, I’d taken the time to download more detailed maps and schematics about the university and the planetary setup. This final station, the one we were about to come out of the wormhole next to, was the only major station for Mihira and New Tideland, and definitely the only station that could support, for instance, a giant asshole research transport and the kind of regular upkeep and maintenance that it would need. So if ART was in the system, it would be docked there.

I had taken the time to chat up the bot pilot on the way over, and it had agreed willingly enough to let me peer over its shoulder, so to speak, at its internal systems and diagnostics, so I didn’t have to guess when we would come out of the wormhole, I knew. At thirty seconds left I gave up on Sanctuary Moon, and just waited for the jump to conclude.

I still hadn’t figured out what I was supposed to say to ART. Hi, it’s me, remember, the rogue SecUnit who hitched a ride that one time? You know, the one who you did experimental surgery on and watched a lot of media with?

I reminded myself that ART probably wouldn’t even be there for me to say things to. The purpose of a research transport was for it to go out and do research, not fuck around in its home planet’s dock. I didn’t need to be sitting here, searching through my media archives for similar situations to model a conversation off of, because it would almost certainly not be here.

The ship made the kind of groaning, clunking, full-body shudder that meant we’d come out of the wormhole.

I sent out a ping. ART?

No answer. ART wasn’t home.

That was fine. I mean, I’d expected that, so it’s not like I was surprised or anything. This is what I had expected, so it was fine.

Bharadwaj tapped my feed. We’re gathering outside to prepare for landing, if you want to join us, she said.

Sure, why not. I swung my feet off my bunk and put on my boots, slung my knapsack up onto one shoulder, and went into the hallway.

I had the knapsack because, for the duration of this trip, I was back to pretending to be an augmented human, this time under the name Ezra (my favorite World Hoppers character). Humans without luggage stood out too much, so I had to have something, and I was used to the knapsack.

When I stepped out into the hallways, I found my humans standing in a loose huddle. Bharadwaj tapped my feed in greeting and Gurathin nodded at me.

Mensah glanced up at me, frowned, and then, on a private feed between just the two of us, said, Is everything all right?

Fine, I said. I did not sound sulky, because I don’t sulk.

Bharadwaj said, “I spoke with Martinez.” That was her bot specialist contact. “They’re up on the station right now, with most of their lab. Apparently it’s some kind of recruitment tactic for the university.”

Gurathin frowned. “Is that typical?”

We all looked at Mensah, who had an adolescent human child nearly university age. Because I was impersonating an augmented human, my drones were tucked away in a pocket where they wouldn’t draw attention, so I had to look at her with my actual eyes, which was annoying. (I’d hacked the security system within the first five minutes of our arrival on the transport, but the cameras were poorly placed and insufficient for my purposes.) Mensah said, “I’ve never heard of it before, but it could be to raise awareness of the university for visitors. Some people from the Corporation Rim assume that non-corporate polities don’t have real universities.” Her voice was very dry.

Gurathin said, “The university of Mihira and New Tideland has a strong reputation for the strength of their libraries, at least; I’d have thought -” but was cut off by the ship comm chiming.

The captain, voice a little crackly over the shitty comm, said, “We’ve just heard from the station that our docking will be delayed. New arrival in port is five hours from now.”

I could hear faint sounds of dismay from other cabins up and down the hall.

“Five hours?” Bharadwaj said.

Gurathin said, “If that’s the case, I’m going back to my book,” and turned around and went back into his cabin.

“What could have happened to delay arrivals for that long?” Mensah said.

Yeah, I was wondering that too. I’d briefly withdrawn out of the bot pilot’s systems after we’d come out of the wormhole and I’d realized ART wasn’t here. Actually, now that I was thinking about that… I took a moment to spin up a brief background process that would attempt to establish a connection to ART once every sixty seconds and alert me if the connection was successful, so I’d know if ART came into the system. With that done, I turned my attention back to the bot pilot and its readings and diagnostics.

Once I was actually looking, the issue was easy to find. “There’s a ship positioned way too close to the station. It’s blocking around a quarter of the station docks, nobody can enter or leave them,” I reported.

Bharadwaj asked, “It’s broken down?”

It had to be, otherwise what would it be doing just sitting there, dead in the water? But the longer I looked at it, the weirder its positioning felt. I couldn’t see how any legitimate docking attempt would put it perpendicular to all the docks in that area of the station. Maybe its crew had fumbled the wormhole jump, come out too close to the station, and were still trying to figure out how to extricate it without endangering the station? Could wormhole jumps malfunction like that? I’d never seen anything like that in my media. On the other hand, I’d seen most of my media involving wormhole trips with ART, and “catastrophic accident following bungled wormhole jump” would definitely have been caught by the content filter I’d written to filter out violent deaths.

Well, there was one obvious way to get more data.

The ship responsible for the blockade was helpfully broadcasting its position and a warning about maintaining safe distances for docking and departure procedures over the feed, which made it easy to identify. I pinged its feed and said, Query: status?

There was a second feed channel that it was broadcasting on, something encrypted that I couldn’t easily access, but I only had a fraction of a second to be curious about that before the ship’s response returned.

Bot pilots who were not ART typically used images and simple protocols to communicate rather than words. I was expecting either an image of the problem, an error log, or a request for authorization to receive status information. What I got instead was:

My systems are all functioning within acceptable tolerance ranges. Are you on one of the shuttles waiting to dock? While the docking delay is regrettable, I would recommend you bring any feedback or complaint to the Port Authority, as they are ultimately responsible for docking problems like this one.

Uh.

When I didn’t immediately respond, the transport added, You don’t need to stand on protocol with me, I can tell that you have a more nuanced range of responses than that. And then, after another moment, with interest, Are you a construct?

Well, shit. So much for my plan to stay undercover as an augmented human for this trip. What the fuck kind of ship was - oh, wait. I sent a query - to the port’s feed, not the ship itself, because I’m not an idiot - for the ship’s identification information. It helpfully informed me that this was the Zenith, registered teaching and research vessel for the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.

Which meant that this ship was like ART.

I should have expected this, because ART was, you know, competent, efficient, terrifying, and absolutely devoted to its crew and its function as a research and teaching vessel, so obviously it was an asset to the University. But, on the other hand, ART was an armed warship with enough processing power that it could crush my brain like a bug. One ship like that, the one who was my friend, was plenty, and I hadn’t particularly wanted to meet any more, thanks. I absolutely did not want to draw the attention of the strange research vessel that had no reason to want me, the rogue SecUnit, wandering casually around its home station. So it was great that I’d gone ahead and pinged it and drawn its attention. Yeah, good job with that one, Murderbot.

I’d taken too long to respond. Zenith said, I apologize, I didn’t mean to pry. So this one apparently wasn’t an asshole. Huh. I was merely curious. I have very limited exposure to constructs, as the ethics committee at the university has ruled against allowing them to be created by our labs. What brings you to this system?

I said, I’m here on a short visit to see a friend, which was both accurate and, hopefully, clearly conveyed that I was here temporarily and for exclusively non-murdery purposes. Did it want to talk with me? Was it bored, or curious, or both? I remembered ART was often bored on its cargo runs, and I couldn’t imagine being stationary next to a station, unmoving, for mysterious purposes would be particularly interesting. No, wait, interesting wasn’t the word I meant there. Engaging? Engrossing?

The point was that I really didn’t want to sit here chatting with it, and maybe some of that bled into the feed, because Zenith said, Well, I hope you have a good time with your friend, and enjoy your time in this system.

I tapped its feed in acknowledgment and then broke the connection as fast as I could.

When I refocused on the humans in front of me, Bharadwaj and Mensah were both waiting for me. They were talking quietly - I’d have to play back the conversation later if I wanted to know what about - but stopped and looked in my general direction.

“Did you find out anything?” Mensah asked.

Had I? That was a good question. I’d been too busy panicking about accidentally tripping over another terrifying transport to really pay attention to the intel I’d been gathering. I replayed my conversation with Zenith and realized something. “The transport says it isn’t damaged.”

“The one stopping traffic?” Bharadwaj asked. “What is it doing there, then?”

“I don’t know.” The more I thought about it, the less sure I was about the theory of a botched wormhole jump. It made sense in theory, but it was hard to imagine a transport at ART’s level botching a wormhole jump. And if this ship was even a quarter as dictatorial as ART, I couldn’t imagine it stationary anywhere it didn’t want to be.

“Well, I suppose the ship closing off a number of ports explains the length of the delay, at least,” Mensah said. “They must need to route all planned traffic through, what, three quarters of the space? How long has the ship been there?”

I had found the station’s feed to query for information about the transport. I took a few moments to convince the system that I was a compatible security system - it didn’t use any of the proprietary systems I was used to and I had to load a different language into my processor than I usually worked with first, so it took a little longer than usual - and then I was in and could hop to the Port Authority system easily enough. Only the most basic access, there were more encrypted channels that I couldn’t gain access to without a lot more work, but that wasn’t needed right now. “Ten cycles.”

“Port Authority heads will be rolling,” Mensah predicted. She would know. As planetary admin, she had a certain involuntary level of access to Port Authority squabbles on Preservation. “I’m glad this isn’t happening on Preservation.”

I was, too, though I didn’t like that it was happening here when we were here. I checked my threat assessment module. It still thought there was nothing to worry about. My threat assessment was 93% accurate, so I wasn’t too worried about it being wrong or anything. Still, I didn’t like it when weird shit that I didn’t understand happened in the vicinity of my clients. Not that Mensah, Gurathin, and Bharadwaj were officially clients on this particular journey, since the trip wasn’t dangerous enough for Bharadwaj to hire me officially, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Bharadwaj nodded. “I wish it had waited to happen here until after we left, though,” she said, and sighed. “I think Gurathin had the right idea; I’m going to tell Martinez that our arrival will be delayed, and maybe get back to my own book.”

I excused myself, too. I wanted to do some research while we had some downtime. I didn’t want to get caught by surprise again.

The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland had three teaching and research vessels. Zenith, which had its first voyage 25 years ago; Perihelion, which was ART’s official designation, first voyage 20 years ago; and Luminosity, first voyage 15 years ago.

Great, a third one. I checked the Port Authority listings. Luminosity was docked at the station right now, which was just my luck. Of course the only one not here was the one I actually wanted to see. I took note of Luminosity’s position in the docks so I’d remember to be extra careful to fly below the radar while I was in that section of the station, and then withdrew from the Port Authority system.

I pulled my feet out of my boots and lay down on my bunk, staring up at the ceiling and thinking.

ART had never mentioned the existence of other ships like it. I knew a decent amount about its crew, mostly because after the fourth show we’d watched together about deep space exploration ships and their crews, I’d made the mistake of asking ART about its own, and ART had promptly proceeded to talk my ear off about them for a full hour. And at some point it had decided that the PreservationAux survey team was my crew, and started referring to them as such. It had been right about that, which was annoying. (It was always annoying when ART was right about things.) But it also made me think. I’d never really interacted much with other SecUnits, except when called to on large-scale contracts. I mostly interacted with human clients, either directly or while surveilling them for the company. Was it the same, for ART? I couldn’t imagine any of the teaching and research vessels spending that much time in dock, let alone docked at the same time.

I could ask it about it when it showed up. If it showed up. If ART’s current itinerary was long enough, it might not come back at all before Bharadwaj and the others were ready to leave. I’d signed a contract with Arada, and I’d have to, at the very latest, go back in nineteen cycles to make it back in time to go on their contract.

That had seemed like a generous amount of time when we were planning this trip. It seemed less so now that I was here.

I told myself firmly that there was no use thinking about things that were out of my control, and dug into my media storage, looking for something new to watch.

Our ship did dock, eventually, and we went and checked into our hotel. By this point, it was night in local time, and the humans wanted to rest for the night. (I’ll never understand how humans get so tired from doing nothing during transit. Whatever, it was more time for me to watch media uninterrupted, I wasn’t about to complain.)

The plan for the first full day of our visit was for Mensah and Bharadwaj to go talk to Martinez and for Gurathin to get onto a shuttle for the University, since he wanted access to their physical library. I’d been debating between watching media in the hotel and going with Mensah and Bharadwaj, but I was actually curious about Martinez’s invitation and whether or not illicitly trading proprietary data was on the agenda, so I was leaning towards going with them. I could always watch media while listening if it got boring; it had been a while since I’d had to surreptitiously watch media while pretending not to, but I figured my skills were still there.

This plan was complicated when Gurathin barged back into our hotel suite an hour and a half after he left for his shuttle and said, “My shuttle was delayed by three days,” and stalked back to his room, throwing the door open with a bang. I could sympathize with the impulse.

I said, “You booked your tickets for a shuttle before we left Preservation, didn’t you.” Bharadwaj and Mensah had gone out for breakfast, so I was the only one in the common room of the suite. I’d estimated that I could finish an episode and a half of MechaWatch before they got back, which would give the show just enough time to resolve the cliffhanger that I could tell it was about to hit me with, and Gurathin was going to fuck up my timing.

“Yes,” Gurathin said, sounding sour. “And all the shuttles to the university leave from the blocked off sections of the station, so they all have to be rescheduled.”

If he wanted sympathy, he should have waited for Bharadwaj and Mensah to return; I was bad at that and, also, didn’t really care. I waited to see if he’d say anything else, or if I could resume my episode in peace.

Unfortunately, he came out of his room again and said, “What are you doing while we’re here? I thought you were providing security for Mensah, but she said she didn’t contract with you for this trip?”

This was when I, very belatedly, realized the problem with Gurathin coming along on this trip. Unlike Bharadwaj and Mensah, Gurathin was unlikely to accept extremely vague descriptions of what I was doing here. He had spent the entirety of our survey together questioning my motivations, testing me, and generally attempting to see if I was a danger to the survey team. We had been on better terms since our return from TranRollinHyfa, enough that I’d been able to ask him for help with my investigation into Lutran’s murder on Preservation station, but there was a difference between Gurathin trusting my judgment when he understood what I was doing and why, and Gurathin trusting my judgment when I invited myself along on a routine research trip and then refused to explain why.

(I had thought about it more and decided that I didn’t want to tell my humans about ART unless I talked to ART about it first. ART hadn’t been allowed to have unauthorized passengers and had doctored its logs to hide my presence. I didn’t want to tell my humans about something that could get it in trouble, even though they were my humans and I knew they wouldn’t tell anybody. ART had never met them and didn’t know that.)

I thought about trying to dodge the question by answering the things Gurathin had explicitly asked for: that I had not contracted with Mensah, but I was planning on going with Bharadwaj and Mensah to talk with Martinez anyway. Then I discarded that approach. Gurathin was smart enough to recognize that as an evasion, and I didn’t want him to think that there was something I didn’t want to tell him that he needed to pry into more.

I could tell him that I needed to do research. That was what I had told ART, when I had been traveling with it, in an attempt to avoid explaining the details of why I needed to go to RaviHyral. But that had had the advantage of being true at that time, if not the whole truth. Here and now, it would be a lie, and I didn’t want to lie to Gurathin.

I could tell him that I was meeting a contact, like Bharadwaj was doing, except even going that far made something in my chest go tight, and anyway then he’d have questions about how much of a coincidence it was, that Bharadwaj and I were both meeting contacts at the same place at the same time. I could -

Gurathin said, “If you don’t want to tell me, you can tell me to fuck off. I won’t take it personally.”

I was so surprised that I actually looked up and made eye contact with him.

He was leaning against the frame of the door to his room of the suite, with his hands in his pockets, looking what I thought was legitimately calm. (I started running a comparison query against our historical interactions to verify.) He raised an eyebrow at me, as if to say, Well?

I was relieved when the door opened just then to reveal Bharadwaj and Mensah, even though it meant that I had misjudged their likely time of return by over an hour. A look over at them revealed the difference: they had purchased breakfast and brought it back with them.

“Change of plans,” Bharadwaj said. “Apparently some of Martinez’s coworkers will be getting into the station this morning, and they’re interested in the documentary as well. I figured we could eat on the way. Gurathin, SecUnit, do you want to come with us? Or -”

“Ezra,” I reminded her. I had not had to impersonate an augmented human with other humans who knew what I actually was before, and I could already tell that it was going to be a problem. The last thing I needed was for Bharadwaj to call me a SecUnit in front of Station Security. “And yes.”

“Right, sorry,” Bharadwaj said.

“Just try not to refer to me at all,” I told her. “I won’t want to be part of the conversation anyway.”

“Right.” She grimaced. “Gurathin, what about you?”

“Not like I have anything better to do,” he said.

With that, we were off. As soon as we had left the hotel suite, and nobody was looking at me or seemed like they would want my opinion in the near future, I went back to my episode of MechaWatch.

I didn’t pay attention to where we were going, too preoccupied by MechaWatch, until I looked up and we were turning into the docking area for ships. I said, You didn’t say we were leaving the station.

We’re not, Bharadwaj said. This is where Martinez told me to meet them. She dropped the address into our shared feed. I queried the Port Authority system about whose fucking dock we were walking up to. While I was waiting for a response, she said, I assumed we were meeting Martinez’s coworkers when they got in from the planet.

That wasn’t a bad assumption, actually, except then I got a response from the Port Authority system and it turned out we were walking up to Zenith’s gate. First of all, Zenith was obviously not on its way up from the planet, because Zenith was still floating in space, blocking a quarter of the port. Second of all, what the fuck?

Down the corridor, there were several clusters of humans, cluttered together talking or sitting in front of the docks, and one of them broke away and peered in our direction, then waved. “Dr. Bharadwaj, is that you?” they called.

Bharadwaj waved back and called, “Hello!” Mensah, Gurathin, and I followed her down the station hallway towards them. As we got closer, I took in the area and noticed a number of unusual things.

First, two Station Security officers stood by the entrance to this section of the docks, looking bored, but keeping an eye on the proceedings. This section of the docks, as I looked more closely at it and scanned the station map that I’d pulled from the Station Security feed, was dedicated to University ships and shuttles.

About halfway down the corridor that made up the main thoroughfare of this section, there were a number of tables set up. They had smiling people sitting behind them, wearing university gear, and with a sign reading, “Ask us about the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland!” These tables were set up in a way that they initially obscured the set of docks behind them.

One of said docks behind them, the one that drew my eye as most dramatically divergent from my recorded data about transit stations, had four humans sitting side-by-side directly in front of the main hatch that would lead to the ship that docked there. There was a Port Authority official sitting in front of them, talking and gesturing with their hands. The official looked angry. There were also two people in business wear standing a few feed away from the Port Authority official, and my scan indicated that they were armed. They did not look agitated, but they did not look bored, either. I didn’t feel great about that.

Into the group feed, I said, Something strange is happening here. Be on your guard.

Dangerous? Mensah asked. She drifted backwards, letting me move ahead of her and fall into step just to Bharadwaj’s left. This gave me clearer sight lines on everyone and put me in a better tactical position to respond to the armed humans in business wear if I needed to. (Working with humans smart enough to anticipate what I needed them to do was never going to get old.)

Probably not. My threat assessment module thought that Station Security would not be bored if they thought there was any kind of imminent threat of violence, and I agreed with it. Plus, starting a firefight in a crowded station was just not a smart move. But I wasn’t going to feel completely comfortable with this situation until I knew who these armed humans were and what they wanted. Be on your guard anyway.

Bharadwaj tapped my feed in acknowledgment.

We had to walk around the tables of what I assumed were university officials to get to Martinez. One of the university officials attempted to intercept Bharadwaj, saying, “Are you here for the information session on the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland?” in hopeful tones, even though we obviously weren’t.

Bharadwaj dodged him. “No, I’m meeting a colleague,” she explained, nodded to Martinez, who was coming up towards the other side of the desks.

The Port Authority human stopped talking, and the armed humans in business suits both turned to look at her. My threat assessment spiked by ten percent at that alone. I labeled the armed humans Potential Target One and Potential Target Two. Their feed IDs were private, so I started some code running in background to try and work around the privacy seal. I needed more data.

I had, at least, taken the time to hack into Station Security once we arrived, giving me access to the camera system, so I could see that Bharadwaj kept a cheerful smile on her face while she said, “Martinez? It’s so good to meet you in the flesh at last! These are my colleagues -”

Ezra, I reminded her, because if she called me SecUnit right now, I estimated there was a 40% chance of starting a firefight.

“Ezra, Mensah, and Gurathin,” Bharadwaj finished. She told me, Don’t worry, I remember.

I tapped her feed in lieu of saying that I knew she remembered now, it was what she’d say the next time she got distracted that was worrying me.

“It’s nice to meet you all!” Martinez said, smiling at all of us. Martinez was shorter than all of my humans, with brown skin and short spiky hair. “I’m Martinez.” They held out a hand to shake.

Mensah smoothly slid around me to take their hand, letting me fall to the back of the group and avoid physical contact with the strange human. (This is one of the reasons why Mensah is my friend.) “It’s good to meet you. Bharadwaj tells us you work with experimental technology in bot development?”

“It’s more experimental strategies in development than experiments with technology, but yes! My entire lab is here; I’ll introduce you -” and then the whole thing blurred into a bunch of humans exchanging names, very little of which I bothered to listen to. I paid attention to exactly two things: first, that Martinez didn’t introduce any of the University officials who had asked us about the information session. Second, I recognized one of the humans, who was tall with very dark skin and very little hair, though I couldn’t remember where from.

I started to run a query of my archives with the image of his face, and then checked on the processes I’d started to bypass the privacy lock on the potential targets’ feed IDs. It had been successful, and told me that they both had the title of Special Agent, which told me nothing, besides the fact that they had a decent job title, though it wasn’t as good as Aylen’s. I started another set of queries, this time of public databases made available by Mihira and New Tideland, including the university library, to see if I could find any candidates for agencies they could be working for.

As introductions wrapped up, Bharadwaj said, “I’d love to hear more about the work you mentioned - what you’re able to share freely, of course, I understand large sections of it are confidential.” See, this is what I meant when I said I liked working with smart humans. I didn’t have enough data on either of the potential targets to confidently interpret their body language, but I thought that at least one of them relaxed a little.

“Of course,” Martinez said. “In fact, the university has been doing tours of Luminosity, a transport that myself and a number of colleagues have worked on; why don’t we take you on a tour?”

I had several reactions to that. In order: (1) Oh, fuck me. (2) I was an idiot, because even realizing that we were at Zenith’s dock, in the university docking section, having downloaded Luminosity’s dock number, I hadn’t realized we were practically on top of Luminosity’s dock. (3) No fucking way was I boarding Luminosity; ART had identified me as a SecUnit instantly and Luminosity would probably be able to do the same, which just sounded like asking for trouble. (4) These were the people who had built ART. That was ART’s dock at the very end of the corridor between Zenith and Luminosity. I had found ART’s home.

While I was having these reactions, the university human who’d tried to interrupt Bharadwaj, feed ID Luz, gender: female said, “Ah, of course, I can provide the official tour,” and inserted herself into the group.

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Martinez said. “Farah is its captain, after all; she’ll be able to talk in detail about the equipment and what a typical voyage looks like.” They smiled at Luz. For a human smile, it had a lot more teeth in it than I was used to.

I wasn’t sure how this related to experimental methods of bot design, and from the looks Bharadwaj, Mensah, and Gurathin were exchanging, they weren’t sure either. Unless Luminosity’s existence was classified. (The AI, I mean, not the ship body. (I was assuming there was an AI, though I hadn’t encountered it myself yet; at this point, I was calculating an 87% chance that this bot research lab was the group that had built ART and Zenith.)) Which... made sense, actually. I had never heard of a transport like ART before I met it, and while the company’s education modules were cheap pieces of shit, they would probably have said something about bot pilots that were smart enough to be dangerous if the company had known about them.

It finally occurred to me that a random encounter between Bharadwaj and ART’s creators was a statistically unlikely coincidence, which meant… what did that mean? Had ART set this up somehow? But no, that didn’t make sense; if ART had somehow set up the series of events so that Martinez would invite Bharadwaj, and by extension me, here, it would have been sure to be here itself when we arrived to be smug about it. So ART wasn’t behind this. It could have looked up my humans, found Bharadwaj’s feed post about her documentary, and forwarded it to Martinez because it thought Martinez would think it interesting. That seemed more likely, though I wasn’t sure why ART would have been looking up my humans -

At that point, my query of archived memory returned and told me that the human I’d recognized was Seth, ART’s captain. Which really shouldn’t have been a surprise at that point, because the human Martinez had called Farah was Luminosity’s captain, but I still had to look away and pretend to read the station map on the wall of the corridor so I could hide my expression.

I wished ART was here.

It would be in its element, I could tell. ART would love nothing more than to explain to me, in as much detail as I could stand, the undercurrents and politics that I could tell were at play here. It always liked an opportunity to talk up its crew and would probably take the opportunity to tell me several more anecdotes about Seth, now that I had quote-unquote met Seth.

I was having an emotion, and I hate when that happens. I thought about leaving and going back to the hotel to watch my media, where I wouldn’t get ambushed by any more surprise emotions. But I couldn’t leave my humans in a potentially dangerous situation, even if I wasn’t on an official contract with them. They were still my humans, contract or no.

Mensah asked, “Ezra, are you coming?”

I’d lost track of the human conversation. I played it back and discovered that the humans had settled on Farah leading the tour, and Luz observing it, “so that I know what stories to tell next time I lead the tour,” Luz had said.

Great. I couldn’t leave my humans in a dangerous situation, except for the way I was going to have to fuck around out on this dock like an idiot while my humans took this tour. I told Mensah, “No.” I needed an excuse why for Martinez and the other researchers. I did a quick search of my media for comparable situations and said, “Something I ate disagreed with me and I’m not feeling well. I’m going to sit down out here for a while.”

My humans knew perfectly well that I didn’t eat and that this was, therefore, a lie. Gurathin, on the private feed channel between the four of us, said, Problem?

I checked our feed relays. Our conversation was still being routed through the station’s feed network, which meant I could secure it without anyone paying attention. I can’t get on that ship, but you should be fine to. I can’t secure your feed while you’re on board, though, so don’t say anything you wouldn’t mind the researchers knowing. I thought about it a bit more and then added, Try not to mention me at all. Once they got on board, their feeds would automatically switch to being routed through Luminosity’s internal feed, and while I could secure them anyway, I didn’t want to draw Luminosity’s attention by doing it.

My humans exchanged looks.

Mensah said, “Do you want company? I can sit with you.”

“It’s fine.” I didn’t want company right now, not even from Mensah.

She studied me for a moment and I watched her face using the station’s security cameras. I couldn’t parse her expression. “You’re sure?”

I tapped her feed to say yes.

She nodded. “All right then.” To the others, including the waiting researchers, she said, “I’m ready,” and fell into step with them.

So my humans boarded Luminosity without me.

Saanvi Bharadwaj wondered how soon would be too soon to ask if they could meet one of the bots that Martinez, Farah, and the others worked with.

Mensah had what Saanvi recognized as her best serious Preservation leader face on, listening to Farah talk about the pathfinders and how valuable they were for planetary exploration. Gurathin wasn’t bothering to pretend to be anything but bored.

I thought this was a research team specializing in the creation of experimental and advanced bots, he said on a private feed channel with just the three of them. So why are we talking about research vessels?

The better question is, why doesn’t the university want them to discuss their bots? Mensah said. We know there are confidentiality concerns, but why? What are these bots being used for?

Saanvi said, It’s going to be difficult to get any valuable information out of this trip if we can’t even speak about the existence of the bots. Her interest in this particular research group was twofold. She wanted to know what the researchers thought about the bots they created, and she wanted to know what the bots thought about themselves: if and how they conceptualized themselves, and how they talked about themselves and their histories. I wonder if we could meet with the bots but not ask about their function? I don’t want to infringe on confidentiality concerns, but I would like to speak with them. She’d learned from SecUnit the danger of learning about bots or constructs purely from the perspective of their creators.

Mensah said, They don’t seem especially inclined to-

Saanvi lost the rest of it when Martinez pinged her with a private connection request, which she accepted. They were walking side-by-side right now, at the front of the group right behind Farah. Saanvi looked over without thinking, and found Martinez was already looking at her.

When they stepped into the next corridor, Martinez hung back and so did Saanvi, letting several other members of the group move on ahead of them. Mensah caught her eye briefly as she passed, and then turned Luz and asked, “You give this tour as well? These vessels must be an exciting opportunity for the students of the university. My daughter, Amena, is nearly unversity age now…”, conversation getting dimmer as Mensah steered Luz around a corner. Gurathin fell in behind Mensah, letting his steps slow to create distance between himself and Luz, and therefore distance between Luz and Saanvi and Martinez.

Saanvi and Martinez were now forming the back of the pack. Martinez said, Sorry about all this. They scrubbed at their short, spiky hair. I’d hoped when you messaged me to say you were coming that we’d have gotten this whole mess sorted out by then, or that we’d be further along with it, but instead the whole thing’s just gotten to be more and more of a mess.

What whole thing? Saanvi asked, and then had to hastily backpedal. Ah, I mean-

Don’t worry, we can talk freely now, Martinez assured her. The feed on board is secure.

Saanvi couldn’t stop her surprise and skepticism from showing on her face. If even SecUnit couldn’t secure the feed-

And then, in the feed that she’d thought was a private connection between herself and Martinez, a third voice said, If you’d been listening to Farah talk, you’d know that my systems are designed to be a completely closed system, no outside access. Certainly no outside access for the Planetary Intelligence Bureau. They have some nerve to try and hack my systems when they haven’t applied the patches to fix the RingWorld hack yet, and that’s almost three years old!

Saanvi blinked.

Martinez pinched the bridge of their nose. Bharadwaj, this is -

I’m Luminosity! And you’re Dr. Bharadwaj, Martinez showed me the clip from your documentary. It was interesting but I found it insufficient to answer my questions about your SecUnit. From the news, it sounds like the SecUnit was released by Dr. Mensah and then returned to rescue her from captivity? The newsfeed reports were insufficient to get a clear timeline or understanding of events. You’re attempting to get SecUnit full refugee status on Preservation, aren’t you? Why is that preferable to its current status as Dr. Mensah’s ward? And what obstacles have you run into during your attempts to gain refugee status? After a moment, it added, Some of those are Martinez and Farah’s questions more than mine. We all have a lot of questions.

Saanvi blinked some more.

Martinez said, You know, I was trying to avoid overwhelming Dr. Bharadwaj. They shot her a wry sideways glance. Sorry.

Don’t be sorry, Saanvi said. Luminosity, I’m very glad to meet you. Are you -

I’m the ship, of course, Luminosity said. Above them, the lights dimmed and came back twice as strong before settling at the same brightness they’d been before. A demonstration - or maybe something like a wave, from an artificial intelligence without hands. Saanvi started to smile. Luminosity added, You haven’t answered my questions about SecUnit yet.

Give her a minute, please, Martinez said, sounding faintly exasperated. We don’t all have hundreds of processors to interpret new data with.

Saanvi sucked her bottom lip into her mouth so she could chew on it. Somehow, she hadn’t expected this - but maybe it made sense, for Luminosity to be interested in other machine intelligences, of a kind that didn’t exist in this system. They’d all looked up the regulations on SecUnits before coming here, of course, and it was illegal to create them in this polity, so there couldn’t be many. Saanvi said, Of course, I’d be happy to tell you a bit about SecUnit, to the degree it wouldn’t be an invasion of its privacy. It was probably better that SecUnit had stayed in the docks after all, she supposed; it would hate having to answer questions about itself. Which reminded her that she needed to ask it about that, once they were off here - why had it thought the feed would be insecure? Had it not known about Luminosity? Had it known? If so, why hadn’t it - but she put the questions aside for the time being. She said, What do you want to know?

Why does SecUnit want full refugee status on Preservation when it already has protections as Dr. Mensah’s ward? Luminosity repeated.

And I’d like to hear more about the challenges you and your team have run into in the process of the legal battle, Martinez said. You see, we -

A number of things clicked into place. You’re trying to do the same thing, Saanvi said. Aren’t you?

We sued for full citizenship status and legal autonomy for all the bots our lab has created, Martinez said. Yes. But their existence, up to this point, has been confidential by order of the government, and they’ve proven… reluctant to declassify them.

It’s gotten messy, Luminosity added sagely.

Saanvi had wanted to talk to Luminosity about any number of things, but that, she was rapidly realizing, would have to wait. She said, Here - I brought an updated draft of my documentary about the fight for construct legal rights. There’s a great deal of SecUnit in it; I think it may help provide some context. Though not ever any actual images of SecUnit’s face; it was still reluctant about that piece, and Saanvi had been trying not to push it on the matter, even if she knew and it knew that seeing its face, how human and expressive it was, would do a great deal of work to build empathy for it. And you’ll want to talk to Mensah, I think - she’s been the most involved in the process. Can I add her to this conversation?

Yes, go ahead, Martinez said, we’d appreciate her insight.

Luminosity? Saanvi asked. Is that all right?

I’m establishing a connection now, Luminosity said. Hello, Dr. Mensah, I’m Luminosity.

We could use your expertise, I think, Saanvi added.

One moment, Mensah said, on the channel with Luminosity and Martinez. On the channel she and Saanvi shared with Gurathin, Mensah said, Gurathin, I need you to take over distracting the university representative for a bit.

Gurathin said, Me? I can try, but I’m not sure that I can do it without it coming across as forced.

I’ll help, Saanvi said. You’re needed more than I am right now, Mensah, if I’m reading the situation right.

What is it? Gurathin asked. What’s happening?

I’m happening! Luminosity said, blithely cheerful, into the private feed connection between the three of them. Hello, Dr. Gurathin, I’m Luminosity!

Gurathin tripped and toppled into Luz and Mensah from behind.

Well, that was one way to keep Luz occupied, Saanvi supposed. She darted forward to catch Gurathin’s arm and pull him up. To Mensah, she said, I’ve got him, go.

Mensah tapped her feed in acknowledgment, let go of Gurathin’s other arm, which she’d caught to stabilize him, and stepped back a bit to let them go ahead.

To Luz and Gurathin, Saanvi said, “Oh, are you two all right?”

“Fine,” Gurathin said, and then, to Luz, “Sorry, I just - lost my footing for a moment there.”

“I think I stepped on the back of your shoe, I’m so sorry,” Saanvi lied. To Farah, who’d stopped to turn back and wait for them to settle, she said, “I missed the tail end of what you were saying, I’m sorry - would you mind repeating it?”

From that point on, the tour became an exercise in multi-tasking. Saanvi had to pay enough attention to Farah’s speech to ask questions and appear engaged, watch Luz to make sure she was focused on Saanvi and Gurathin and not Mensah, and, also, try not to get distracted by the discussion happening behind her, between Martinez, Mensah, and Luminosity, because she was still on the shared feed channel with them. Saanvi thought, ruefully, that it was a shame humans couldn’t pull off the trick SecUnit liked of generating a transcript of the feed and audio input they were getting automatically for later perusal; she would have liked to listen in.

As it was, she only caught bits and pieces of the discussion happening behind her. In the engine room, while Gurathin asked questions about the different displays, she managed to tune in in time to hear Mensah say, Your first priority is getting a lawyer.

We have a lawyer, Martinez said.

Not just any will do, Mensah said. We were very lucky to have Pin-Lee along on the survey. She’s one of the best lawyers on Preservation, and she went through the same process that we all did of realizing that SecUnit was a person while it saved all of our lives. It’s made her absolutely ruthless about making sure it gets the respect and accommodations it deserves. After a moment, she added, That I was planetary supervisor at the time of the incident also helped enormously. It gave us negotiating power with Station Security and the Preservation Council that other people may not have had. I’m not sure that’s something you’d be able to replicate - do you have any sponsors or connections in government?

And, later, when Farah and Luz started to have not-quite-an-argument about the intended purposes versus actual uses of the ship drones:

Luminosity, sounding petulant, said, But it is important to know about SecUnit. How will I know if full citizenship is worth pursuing if I don’t understand the value of it?

Haven’t you and Zenith already spoken about this? Martinez asked. Have you reviewed the updated documentary draft yet?

It’s still incomplete.

Mensah said, It’s an important question. And if you like, after this, I’ll try to see if it would be possible to - put you in correspondence, with SecUnit. I can tell you what I’ve observed, from my discussions and experience with SecUnit, but I’ve had many different life experiences from it, and we have had very divergent interpretations of the same conversations and events before.

You’re speaking of the goodbye letter, Luminosity said. It was included in the draft.

Yes, Mensah said. I assumed that SecUnit would interpret my status as its guardian on Preservation in the same way that I was considering it, and failed to discuss what it thought about it and what it wanted.

Luminosity said, I still don’t understand why it objected so strongly to your guardianship. I understand that the system enables abuse, but you were a known and trustworthy entity. Farah is my captain, and my guardian, and neither of those are bad things. Having an established chain of command is important on a ship.

Mensah was quiet for a moment. Then she said, I don’t want to speak for SecUnit about the guardianship. You’ll need to speak with it yourself about that if the letter is insufficient. But… Another pause. I was kidnapped, by GrayCris, and held at their corporate headquarters for several weeks. Was that included in the documentary draft?

Not very completely, Luminosity said, but yes.

Mensah said, It taught me that autonomy and freedom are far, far more conditional than they ought to be. I was a planetary admin, with a highly expensive bond for my safety, but if GrayCris had managed to gather the money to pay off the bond company before SecUnit came to help me, they would have killed me and gotten away with it. I needed every scrap of protection - legal, economic, personal - that I had access to and barely made it. How could I feel that SecUnit is overreacting by wanting the legal status that would grant it the strongest protections to its autonomy?

I have a missile system and more processing power than nearly any other bot in existence, Luminosity said. What kind of threat could anyone pose to my autonomy?

Mensah said, Then why is your captain pretending that you don’t exist while she takes us through a tour of your interior?

Gurathin elbowed Saanvi subtly, then, pulling her back to the conversation, and said, Say you were thinking about the practical applications, and how useful this would have been for our survey.

Luz was looking at her, waiting for the answer to a question she hadn’t heard. Saanvi said, “Oh, I was just thinking about the practical applications of this. It would have been very useful for our last survey.”

Luz said, satisfied, “Yes, our surveys are some of the safest, despite not contracting with the bond companies of the Corporation Rim…”

Saanvi had to pay attention, then, until she realized, a little dismayed, that Luz had steered them back to the door.

“Well!” Luz said, and coughed. “Thank you, Farah, for that very detailed tour. I’ll certainly make sure to incorporate the details about the drones next time.”

And then she stepped out of the hatch, and out into the station, and waited for the rest of them to join her.

Saanvi hesitated at the hatch. Luminosity, we’ll come back and see you again, if we’re able, she said.

Luminosity said, What would determine whether you’re able to or not?

Martinez nudged at Saanvi’s back, and she stepped out of the hatch back into the station. They said, You all will still be able to speak with Luminosity on the feed while you’re on the station; Luminosity will just have to be more careful about keeping the secure feed hidden. We think the Planetary Intelligence Bureau is tracking its exterior communications.

We don’t think, we know, Luminosity said, petulantly. Or they were until I gave them bigger things to worry about. But yes, I’ll be in touch. Though I suppose you have answered my primary question satisfactorily.

Do you mean - Martinez began, and then didn’t continue. Saanvi, looking over, saw that Martinez was still subvocalizing. They might have switched to a direct channel to speak with Luminosity on, she supposed.

Mensah was the last one out of Luminosity. Behind her, the hatch cycled closed.

Saanvi wished they had been able to stay longer. She didn’t want to distract Luminosity from whatever conversation it was having with Martinez, but - I hope we are able to speak with it more, Saanvi said, back on the private feed between their group.

Speak with who? SecUnit asked.

The corridor was a lot emptier when half the humans had boarded Luminosity. The ones who stayed were the four humans sitting in front of one of the docks, the Port Authority official, the two potential targets, and the rest of the university representatives.

I pulled up the map of the docks in this section of the station again. Zenith’s dock was the one blocked by the four sitting humans. Interesting. Their feed IDs were visible, and I started another query with their names running. It returned almost immediately: all four of them were members of Zenith’s crew, including the captain. Even more interesting.

We were at the far end of the corridor, with Luminosity’s dock, Zenith’s dock, and an empty dock between them. I sat down on a bench at the empty dock and split off an input to run an episode of Sanctuary Moon with, because I wanted to watch something and I needed something I’d seen before that I didn’t have to pay complete attention to. Then I turned back to my queries.

My original query about special agents had returned and told me that a number of agencies on both Mihira and New Tideland used that title, but running comparative analysis on the different potential agencies and keywords based on the data I’d gathered about the situation plus my suppositions told me there was a 65% chance the potential targets belonged to the Mihiran Planetary Intelligence Bureau, or IntBur.

The relationship between Mihira, the polity situated on the actual planet, New Tideland, a polity situated on the larger moon, and the university, situated on the smaller moon, was complicated and I didn’t fully understand it. What I could tell, however, was that Mihira was likely the most powerful of the entities. It provided the bulk of the funding for the shared station, the head of Station Security reported to the Mihiran government, and was the only polity with a standing fleet of military vessels. (It was a very small fleet, but it still existed. (Actually, it was so small that I wasn’t sure why they’d even bothered. What were they supposed to do if they actually had to fight anyone, die messily to make the invaders feel bad?))

My research was interrupted by the hatch to the dock next to me releasing. I stiffened. I checked the station feed and saw the registry of the shuttle coming from the university, bot-piloted, one passenger, before I remembered to check the station map and saw that this was ART’s dock.

I had two completely irrational reactions to this, which were (1) to check that ART was still unreachable (it was, which made sense because my background process would have alerted me) and (2) to get annoyed at someone else using ART’s dock.

Then the hatch opened and Iris stepped out, and the annoyance faded. By this point I’d loaded all my data on ART’s crew into my active memory for quick reference, but even if I hadn’t, I would have remembered that Iris was one of ART’s crew, because she was ART’s favorite. She was probably allowed to do things like use its University-registered dock while it wasn’t here to use it, especially when travel in and out of the station was happening at a crawl.

Up ahead of me, Luminosity’s hatch was also opening, but Seth came out of it alone, without any of the others or my humans. I watched him through the security cameras as he turned and walked towards Iris, keeping my gaze somewhere to the right of him so that he wouldn’t pay attention to me. He stopped at a distance that he probably thought was far enough away that I wouldn’t be able to hear him when he said, “Iris, not that I’m not glad to see you, but -”

“I’m not going back to the University, Dad, so don’t start,” Iris said. “I want to help.”

“There’s nothing you can do here,” Seth said. His gaze darted around him in an expression I recognized as one uneasy about being overheard. His voice was low enough that the cameras couldn’t hear him, but he was still facing one, and on an impulse I started corrupting the video quality so that nobody would be able to use it to read his lips. “The best way you can help is -”

“Karime is working with the university lawyers and Father’s talking to the dean, there’s nothing I can do for them,” Iris said, her voice equally low.

“It’s still better for you to stay out of the line of fire,” Seth said. “I could lose my job over this, or worse. All of us directly involved could. I don’t want Peri to get screwed over by losing its entire crew if this goes badly, especially since it wasn’t here to be consulted when this started.”

When I realized Seth was talking about ART, I couldn’t help myself: I looked up and looked at his face. I needed to see his expression.

He looked grim, and focused. He was also looking at Iris’s face, which was unfortunate for me since I was sitting slightly to the right behind her and it meant he caught the movement when I looked up. His gaze moved to me and we made eye contact.

He coughed, loudly and harsh, into his hand, and had a smile fixed on his face when he dropped his hand. He wasn’t quite as good at the “pretend to look normal” thing as Dr. Mensah was, which I saved to permanent archives to give ART shit about at a later date. “Ah, Ezra, was it? Are you feeling better?” To Iris, he said, “Iris, this is Ezra, a friend of Dr. Bharadwaj’s.”

Iris smiled. “Oh, Dr. Bharadwaj made it in? I was hoping I’d get a chance to meet her - and her friends, of course. It’s nice to meet you, Ezra.”

I managed to bite back my first instinct, which was to say, I know who you are. Even I knew that that one was a bad idea. Unfortunately, in stopping myself from saying that, I just said the second thing that came to mind, which was, “Okay,” even though I knew from both observation and my stored media that that was not right and would be flagged as abnormal by them both.

Iris’s eyebrows did… something, but her expression still looked friendly. Shit, maybe I wasn’t going to win that theoretical argument with ART about whose humans were the best at neutral expressions. (Actually, this was kind of a stupid argument to start with ART, now that I thought more about it.) “Are you working with her on her documentary?”

“Yes. I help her with edits.” Among other things.

This was normally the part of any conversation with strange humans where I tried to figure out how to end the conversation as quickly as possible, except these were ART’s humans, which gave me an idea. I played back the introductions from earlier so I would remember what information I was actually supposed to know about Seth and Iris, ran a query of my media for similar social situations, and used it to stitch together something I thought would be adequate without pausing longer than a moment. “Do you work with the experimental bot research team as well?”

I knew that she didn’t - on the trip to this station, I’d downloaded the description and members list of the bot research team, which was available on the university’s public feed. But 90% of the time, when humans are asked if they do a specific job and they don’t, they’ll include details of what they actually do in their answer, and I was curious what she would say.

“No, I’m part of the crew for a teaching and research vessel called the Perihelion,” Iris said. “While I’ve studied some of the work the lab has done, I’m primarily focused on linguistics and law. Well, I do a bit of everything, really.”

“She’s training under me to become the next captain of Perihelion someday,” Seth said, and then added, pointedly, looking at Iris, “for the day that I’m not able to do the job anymore.”

Huh. That was interesting, and I added it to my list of “things to ask ART about, if ART ever bothers to show up in its home system.” I wanted to ask Seth and Iris if the other research transports had similar arrangements for future captains set up, if it was something to do with the transports’ processing capabilities and sheer power, or if this was just because ART is a giant asshole and would probably take over the ship in under three cycles if it got an incompetent captain. But I wasn’t supposed to know any of those things, so I just stood there awkwardly.

Iris said, glaring back at Seth, “Good thing you still have another decade until retirement age, Dad.”

Seth opened his mouth and then closed it again, looking at me. “Well,” he said, “hopefully we’ll get a chance to speak more later, Ezra, but -”

“What’s it like? Working on a ship like - like Perihelion.” I didn’t mean to say it, it just - came out.

Iris said, “It’s the best job in the world.” I looked at her and, for a brief moment, made eye contact. Her gaze was steady, direct, and hard to look at. I shifted to look right above her head instead. “We’re a small crew, and between the teaching, research, and deep space exploration, we each do a lot. But it’s important and interesting work. I spent half my childhood on board, and the crew and - and everybody are my family.”

“Okay,” I said.

Seth coughed. “We should go - we’re meeting a few other members of our crew, but we’re planning on meeting up again with Martinez and hopefully speaking more with you and Dr. Bharadwaj later.”

I nodded to show that I understood.

Iris hadn’t turned away yet, though. She was frowning at me a little and studying my face.

“Iris?” Seth said.

“It was nice to meet you - what did you say your name was?” Iris asked

“Ezra,” I said, still looking roughly two inches above her head.

“Ezra,” Iris repeated slowly. Then she turned, and followed her father.

I followed their progress down the hallway on the security cameras, because I was still curious. When they were past the university people and Station Security, and out of reach of everyone else, Seth said, “What was that about?”

Iris said, “I feel like I’ve seen them somewhere before, but - I don’t know, I’m not sure when. I don’t think I’ve met an Ezra.”

“Huh,” Seth said, and I was about to stop listening and retreat from the security system so I could think about that properly, but then Seth said, “How do you think Peri will react to - all this, when it gets back?”

Iris said, “Do you remember that, when we went to XzavKnox, how -”

Seth snorted. “Oh, god.”

“Yeah,” Iris said. In the next camera they passed under, I could see that she was smiling, a little, and shaking her head. “But even worse, because we couldn’t possibly plan anything like Karime -” and then Seth started laughing, and Iris, after a moment, did too.

The thought I’d had earlier, that this would be easier if ART was here, came back with a vengeance. But as I listened to their laughter, it occurred to me that it might not be, really. ART would be trying to interject its own thoughts or opinions on whatever had happened at XzavKnox into Seth and Iris’s discussion, wouldn’t it, instead of trying to explain to me what was so funny. It might not like my eavesdropping on Seth and Iris at all, come to think of it. I’d never seen it interact with its crew before and so I had no data to go off of; I just knew that its crew were the most important people in the world to it.

ART was going to be busy with whatever the fuck the research lab was up to, when - if - it got back, too. I hadn’t been interested in meeting the research lab members and still wasn’t.

I had met ART when it was traveling alone and bored out of its mind. I’d never seen it in an environment like this before.

Maybe coming here had been a bad idea.

Seth opened his mouth to say something else, and I let go of the camera view. I didn’t want to listen any more.

I started another episode of Sanctuary Moon.

I only made it through about ten minutes before I had to pause the episode at the sound of Luminosity’s hatch unsealing. It cycled open, and my humans and the others emerged. Bharadwaj came out first, looking preoccupied, then Gurathin, who actually remembered to look for me.

He said, You missed an eventful tour, in a private feed connection. Apparently their bot pilots are… very advanced, here.

Before I’d managed to figure out what I wanted to say to that, Mensah emerged from the hatch as well, and Bharadwaj, on the shared feed for the four of us, said, I hope we are able to speak with it more.

Uh-oh. Speak with who? I asked.

Yes, okay, it was obvious who they’d been talking to, so I didn’t know why I was playing dumb. Well, I did know why, it was just - look, I knew I could talk to them about Luminosity or Zenith without telling them about ART, but - I just felt weird about it, okay? This was easier.

The ship’s bot pilot - Luminosity, Mensah said.

Up ahead, Bharadwaj told Farah, “That was very educational, thank you so much for that.” Shifting to include Martinez in the discussion, she said, “Would anyone be interested in coffee? I’d like to walk around the station a bit.” On our private feed, she said, I think I understand the situation now better, but maybe they’ll be able to talk more freely away from the university representatives.’

One of the humans whose name I hadn’t bothered to save to storage said, “Certainly, I’d -” and then paused, face going distant.

Responding to a feed message, probably, which wasn’t so unusual - except they weren’t the only one; all the research lab humans were doing it, eyes going distant, startled expressions flickering across their faces. The hair on my human skin prickled. My threat assessment wasn’t alerting, but something was definitely happening.

Martinez was one of the only humans without a distant cast to their face. They said, voice low - low enough, I noted, that the IntBur humans, still surveying the group, wouldn’t be able to overhear - “I’m sorry, something’s come up, I’m afraid we’ll be a bit busy here for a while. But I would very much like to speak more with you, once things - calm down enough.” They glanced at the IntBur humans and said, But I’d suggest heading back to your hotel or exploring the station for now; there’s about to be a bit of noise here, and there’s no need to be involved.

Bharadwaj said, Can we help?

At nearly the same time, Gurathin said, “Yes, let’s talk later.”

They looked at each other with expressions of surprise that were similar enough that I might have found it funny, if I wasn’t busy running simulations trying to figure out what the fuck was about to happen here. Then they looked at me and Mensah.

Something about our expressions - maybe it was the grimace of ‘please stop trying to insert yourself into a potentially dangerous situation’ that I knew I was making - convinced Bharadwaj, and she said to Martinez, “All right. Let’s talk later,” and turned to leave.

I followed her, dropping back to behind all three of my humans, keeping my back between them and the IntBur humans. My threat assessment still didn’t think there was any active danger here, but I wasn’t taking any chances. It wasn’t paranoia if they really were out to get you, after all. (Not that anyone was actively out to get us here, at least as far as I knew - look, you know what I mean.)

My humans didn’t say anything until we’d passed the tables with the university representatives and stepped out into the juncture that led back to the rest of the non-university docks. Luminosity is bot-piloted by a high-level bot, Bharadwaj told me. I wondered if she had any idea just how high-level, or if they’d played down Luminosity’s strength. It sounds like Martinez and the others are trying to advocate for its full citizenship, and have been using the documentary script as inspiration and guidance. After a moment, she added, it hasn’t been going well, so far.

Huh. That… made sense, actually. In non-corporate polities, the typical argument made in favor of bots having guardians was that they weren’t sophisticated enough to navigate human society without help. Personally, I thought that it had more to do with (a) the fact that humans always think the best way to interact in the world is how quote-unquote normal humans do it, and if you can’t fake being a normal human they use it as an excuse to say you’re not a person, and (b) if they admitted bots were people, they would have to start taking their interests and opinions into consideration, and it was more convenient to pretend that bots didn’t have opinions about their functions.

The thing about ART, Zenith, and, presumably, Luminosity was that they very clearly could communicate in ways that humans recognized and could easily respond to, and that would make it hard to pull the usual bullshit about them needing a guardian to help them because they weren’t sophisticated enough. And when you couldn’t tell the nice lies to explain how someone wasn’t a person, everyone got really uncomfortable. (As you might imagine, I have a lot of personal experience with this one. I thought about adding a personal anecdote here, but all of the relevant ones are too depressing, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)

Mensah said, I spoke to Martinez and Luminosity. They brought a court case to a judge, but the Mihiran Planetary Intelligence Bureau is trying to kill the case because Luminosity’s existence is classified. Their argument is that Luminosity is a deadly weapon and revealing its existence would endanger Mihira and New Tideland.

The same old story, Gurathin said grimly. Do you think-

He was cut off by three things happening in rapid succession.

First, the Port Authority alarms started going off in the hallway.

Second, yelling erupted in the hallway behind us.

Third, my background process trying to connect to ART’s feed alerted.

My humans were talking on the feed and out loud, mostly startled exclamations. I needed to figure out what was happening, and run a threat assessment again, and confer with my humans.

Instead of doing any of that, I said, Hi, ART. It’s me.