Archive of Our Own

I had a headache.

The mission was complete except for the final "get the fuck off this planet" part. I didn't have to worry about the how (one of ART's shuttles was already on its way), and I mostly trusted our humans to stay safe until it got there (their part of the mission consisted mostly of staying in public places with a lot of cameras and innocuously using unprotected public feeds to create as much alibi as possible). All I had left to do was to walk to our rendezvous point, preferably through the humanless agricultural areas. The route also happened to allow me to sort through my most recently downloaded media, so.

Not much for me to worry about, for once. Could almost be nice. If not for the stink of local fields, and the unsettling greenish tint that this planet's atmosphere gave to sunlight.

And for the fact that I had a very literal headache.

I took stock of the wounds I had, deemed them annoying, but not requiring constant monitoring, and went to dial down my pain sensors until I reach ART's medbay. Both my shot wounds shut up agreeably, but the headache seemed to only grow. Something was wrong.

I dialed the sensors back up. Then shut them off entirely. The headache was totally unimpressed, still thumping in rhythm with my footsteps. I started to slowly push them up, fraction by fraction of percent.

As the numbers were rising, I felt ART curiously moving closer to me in the feed at almost the same pace, paying more and more attention. It felt not unlike a second headache gradually enveloping the back of my head.

Around the 6,8% I snapped, "What?"

Why are you doing this?

"Why do you think?!"

…I'd rather hear your version, ART relied just a little too fast, as if I caught it red-handed. I squinted suspiciously at the flora that I was wading through, but decided that I had a better chance to get away without explaining anything if I didn't demand that ART explained itself, either.

(I didn't like having malfunctions, but I really didn't like others noticing when I have them. Even ART.)

"Got some software error. Guess that's as long as I should be running without a restart."

(Except that my systems had to alert me to errors, including the anomalies in my organic parts' behavior. And they didn't.)

(It wasn't worth the risk to try restarting in the middle of possibly hostile nowhere.)

What kind of error?

Ugh. Normally, or at least most of the time, I didn't mind hearing ART. But right now its preferred voice seemed extra grating. Especially paired with cracking of the cheap expendable comms we all got for this mission.

I sent it on the feed: I'm fine. Then I immediately tumbled down a ditch.

I was braced for the impact and landed perfectly, of course. But the headache flared like white light. For approximately 4 seconds it blinded me, and I had trouble keeping precise time.

Oh fuck.

Once I confirmed that I could still breathe, I redacted the last message: I am incapacitated.

ART swooped onto me in the feed like a flying prey fauna. It had been watching my diagnostics before, intrigued by me running it so often, but now it riffled through them frighteningly fast.

(I kind of hoped that it would panic with me. Just for a bit.)

Give me a visual, demanded ART. I considered telling it to fuck off, then just pushed controls for one of my drones into our shared workspace. ART sent it to fly a slow loop around me, and we both examined how I looked unremarkable from all sides, just disgustingly sweaty (when did that happen?) and crouching in some ditch. At least the dirt didn't stick to me too much on my way down. Then I sat back and compared another drone's footage to what I was seeing with my eyes.

Your stats seem fine, ART pointed out cautiously. As if I didn't know that I looked like an idiot.

I had seen that ditch before reaching it, of course. I was sure I'd just walk past it, leaving it a few steps to my left, but.

I misjudged the distance and direction of my own movement. Badly enough to fall. That's how you get killed.

Even if there was no imminent fight right now, I was still bound to die in some embarrassingly stupid way. Like accidentally walking off a building. There were no buildings in a four kilometer radius, either. But still.

(Okay, maybe I was panicking, but. I didn't even know what the cause was; there were no hacking attempts, no downloads, not even any physical threats in the last few hours. Did I need to hurry up, or would I become a danger to humans by the time I reached the shuttle as I progressively lost control? I settled on staying where I was for now.)

Okay, said ART, and I could  feel it shifting and re-prioritizing the numerous tasks it was handling. Was that caused by the error?

I tried to shrug. Okay, no shrugging. The headache immediately got worse, which mostly made me annoyed, but there was no one to be annoyed at but myself. At least getting shot made that aspect easier.

The plants around me caught a gust of wind and moved out of sync. I didn't like how my eyes reported the world as much blurrier then my unfiltered drone cameras.

…And the fact that I forgot how good ART was at reading facial cues. How bad is the pain?

As if it ever mattered. I wasn't sure how to measure it without a pain control system anyway.

That's irrelevant. Get the humans to orbit.

I can still handle this mission, thank you. How. Bad.

So much for just waiting out until I was at medbay and any of my problems could (hopefully) get immediate solutions. I sighed and admitted, Feels like there's a nail stuck in the side of my head.

But there isn't.

I would have noticed.

(That last one almost sounded like a question, which was honestly insulting.)

ART, I'm serious. We can figure me out once the crew is safe.

I don't have a second shuttle right now to send for you personally, so you are coming along with them. You are as much my crew as them.

That was ART's "don't even try to argue with me" tone. Along with what was possibly a bad, really bad decision.

The next moment ART's capability to manage this mission within the optimal parameters got disproved, because our slow-to-react humans started to panic.

My comms erupted with horrible, ear-grating noise. At least three voices were asking helpful, elaborate questions like "what the?.." and "WHAT?!", then demanding that everyone sticks to comm protocol while yelling it over each other, and it felt like they were collectively drilling my left temple from the inside.

On an impulse I cut the comms off. I expected to feel guilty (we weren't supposed to use them outside of emergencies, but fully disabling comms was an unjustified breach of our security), yet the relief I felt was so immense that I marked it as one of the best decisions in my life.

ART and Three still had them. The data I went after was already wiped from all local servers, I hadn't been followed, and a quick search of public feeds showed no familiar names on any public wanted lists. (Yet). I could quietly panic in the privacy of my own head without making it a party.

You also would have noticed your software accumulating error alerts. This could be an organic option.

(It didn't say "again", but it needn't have. I didn't consider that option only because it was one which I had zero ways to solve.)

As I ignored 7 of my feed channels lighting up with new messages, I heard the sound of plants getting crashed somewhere in the distance.

I snapped my head up (ouch) to track it against the sickly sunlight (ouch), then realized that I'm a dumbass and commanded a drone to get a view over the flora. This immediately got me an incoming ping. Uh-huh.

Okay, now Three didn't have the humans, either. ART was stellar at security decisions.

A few minutes later Three arrived at full run. (I needed to remind Three to tune it down to human-like speeds while there was still a chance of us being watched by some stray satellite. But I was kind of glad to see it, so I decided to be a jerk about it later.) It reached my sad little ditch and awkwardly hovered at one side.

"ART changed the rendezvous point to these coordinates," Three said. I grated my teeth, because it was another reckless adjustment of our plan and also because Three's voice was almost as annoying as ART's. This whole situation was so stupid. I considered checking if something similarly stupid ever happened in my media, but then decided this search would give me too many results.

I stared at Three. It stared at me.

I felt ART nudge Three somewhere in the feed, and it finally sent me: Perimeter secure. System reload recommended.

It meant that they'd keep watch so I can try to unfuck my systems right here and now.

I was so ready to get rid of this stupid error that I barely remembered to send an acknowledge before initiating a restart.

***

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY: 86%

I went back online. ART was hovering anxiously in my feed, still peeking through my drone camera.

"Status?" Three asked right over my ear, loud as a fucking gunshot. Ouch.

Could you just ping, I protested and cautiously opened one eye. The sickly sunlight still made my insides churn, but now it also felt painfully sharp, as if the photons were trying to fistfight my eyeballs.

Meanwhile all my systems reported no problems whatsoever. (Except for two gunshot wounds in my left shoulder, which still didn't count). Not even the pain sensors. I didn't think the sensors themselves could break without the control system noticing, since they weren't exactly organic. But messing with them continued to only affect the shot wounds (which were still rivaling the headache if I let them).

I managed to stand up without staggering, small wins. Yet sure enough, Three looked all out of focus despite my drone cameras getting a clear picture. My eyes told me that Three was standing within my reach, but I could no longer trust my judgement of that to be accurate.

I closed my eyes to stop the photon violence. The shared drone was still showing me me, and I directed it away in disgust. ART tried to turn it back. For a moment we silently fought over it, and just as I prepared to yank its access from the shared workspace, a wave of depression finally washed over me. 

The risk assessment wasn't even providing me any hints and ideas. I've run out of options to try and fix it. I gave up.

You're still in pain, said ART.

Which means it wasn't an error, said Three.

What a polite way to put it that I was critically compromised.

Three offered, I can carry you and run to meet the shuttle?

Even without my risk assessment I knew that it was bound to jostle whatever broke in my brain and probably make me die even faster. Hell no.

We're not leaving you here, either. My medbay is getting readied. As soon as you're aboard, I'm fixing it.

As if this was a regular problem, like me losing a dozen percent of my body mass, no biggie.

You're not a certified SecUnit surgeon, you know.

I think I'm getting there, said ART. I keep gaining the expertise.

Not when we don't even know what causes the problem!

I'll make sure to submit an article once I figure it out.

I sighed.

This is the kind of thing that even cubicles don't fix. I've read my manual. A lot.

Your manual doesn't exactly prioritize your survival, said ART, and it wasn't entirely true. It's just that retrieving my disfigured body for parts still counted as survival in the company's books. It loved charging both rent AND fines for when SecUnits got mauled and abandoned, but it was cheaper to retrieve and restore our remains in a cubicle then make anything new, so the cubicles they designed were really highly functional.

Are you trying to imply that I'm inferior to a cubicle?

It was obviously a bait to keep me bickering. I felt too tired to take it, so I simply sent, Sorry.

The things is, pain was nothing. I could live with pain, and the times I did just that added up to a noticeable percent of my lifetime. Now, not being able to evaluate my surroundings, experiencing random uncontrollable pains and getting a new organic malfunction every few minutes, all while the robotic parts of me didn't even register that there was anything wrong… I compared the rate at which I was deteriorating with the projected time of reaching ART's medbay.

Yeah, I was basically dead. It sucked to be dying right after a successful mission.

No, ART said fiercely.

I'd appreciate at least having something I still needed to do while it happened.

And then ART broke into me.

I never stood inside a waterfall, but this was how I imagine it must feel. Before I could react, ART rummaged through my active processes and got into my logs of the last several hours, not as much hacking my encryption as swatting it away with a power of a wormhole engine. It grabbed the video and started fast forwarding through it like I was a security camera.

ART?..

It felt weird. Like there was too much me inside of me, except it wasn't all me, it was ART, and I trusted ART enough for its presence to not entirely freak me out, even as ART reached the current timestamp and then restarted it at a lower speed, dragging out my footnotes from the logs. (These are kinda personal. Not that ART wasn't snooping on my thoughts on the regular.)

The weirdness of it quickly grew overwhelming. I could probably get adjusted even to this much of ART's presence in my systems, except my processors were starting to throw out overheating alerts and I suddenly had a disturbing realization that since my body planned to give out on me any moment, it might get ART trapped inside, and I felt some extremely uncomfortable way about it.

I managed to choke out, "ART, stop."

It kept going with a tunnel-visioned determination. I tried to push it out, but I might as well had pushed at a planet. I tried calling it again. And again. And—

"PERIHELION, YOU'RE HURTING IT!"

I flinched, ART froze, and all of the drone cameras got directed at Three.

It was clasping my wrists in a hold used for restricting clients from hurting themselves. I wasn't sure what I'd been trying to do, but there were new minor skin damage alerts. I was breathing heavily.

(I wasn't actually hurt. But I wasn't sure exactly what I was, so I kept my mouth shut.)

I am searching for the cause, ART sounded defensive. It could see my emotions literally inside out right now, and seemed to realize that this had maybe possibly required a warning and a go-ahead from me, which raised the question of why was it only realizing it now. ART was usually more polite about rummaging inside my head than the company's technicians. (It felt very different, but I wasn't going to inspect that now.)

"Get a fucking copy," I breathed out. And use the feed, fuck.

And get out, added Three in a perfectly calm tone. I cautiously pulled, and Three released my hands without question before backing half a step out of my space.

ART hastily bundled whatever files it wanted and fucked off from my system. It left me literally light-headed, and this time I did sway a bit. The headache that flared shortly at Three's yell now resumed its dull throbbing. It seemed like ART's presence had been warding off some of it, squishing it out by taking up so much space in my brain.

(I instinctively bookmarked this as a possible solution for future headaches. Except I wasn't supposed to experience headaches, and the future was very much cancelled for me.)

I felt like laying face down on the ground. So I did.

After breathing in the stink of the flora for a moment, I heard Three sit at the edge of my ditch. I asked in our shared feed: What the fuck was that?

My apologies, ART had the decency to sound embarrassed, even though it no doubt was still dissecting my memories in the background. I rarely find myself in situations when anyone on my crew is dying, let alone being so stubborn about it. I didn't realize that my attempts to help also cause you distress. I'll try to keep them out of your sight and allow you to sulk.

What an asshole. And yet, the mighty MI was willingly admitting to miscalculations now.

(I thought about the third episode of World Hoppers, and how I still wasn't sure if ART ever lost any of its crew or clients yet. No shit.)

You're firing all your emotional filters right now, aren't you?

I'm always using them, or I wouldn't be able to make my own choices among the thousands of possible courses of actions that I assess every second.

In any other situation it'd be nice to hear ART admit that it actively chooses to be such an asshole. Still, this sounded like a poor choice. I'd gladly turn mine off right now, if I had any. Come to think of it, I already felt kind of numb.

But I admit I've left some of the parameters inactive. Mostly the ones I've built while watching you watch media are set aside as unfinished, as I expect they still need finer tuning, admitted ART. So at least we were on the same page about it- Actually, this might be a fitting moment to try them.

Not advisable,Three said quickly.

Okay, on the same page with Three instead. You really don't want to.

…Oh, said ART in a tone which told that yep, it'd already done it.

I felt its activity in the feed grinding almost to a halt, even the endless record scratch of it looping my logs. For a moment I was scared it might fumble life support up in its spaceship or something equally stupid, but luckily the distant ocean of digital activity kept moving somewhere on the verges of what I could see of ART. It stayed silent for 4 full seconds.

How do humans even tolerate this?

(Not unlike the SecUnits.)

Poorly. I pulled an episode from season 3 of Sanctuary Moon, where the solicitor's bodyguard seemingly dies (before returning half a season later), and tried to run it in the feed. Except when the opening song started playing, I only managed to tolerate my favourite sound in the world for 9.1 seconds. Then I hit stop and tried to lay on the ground even harder.

ART sent me a question mark. I said, Sounds are awful.

But this one's only in the feed?

I sent ART an affirmative, and no, I didn't understand how the fuck it was different from them talking on the same feed, either. My systems didn't stick to a logic as they kept going out of whack. In the drones' feed I could see Three frown, then tilt its head to the side.

ART carefully moved the video file to a muted feed, where it and Three resumed watching it without me. Dying suddenly sucked even more.

I actually have information on how humans manage grief, said Three.

So do I, said ART. It was mostly a rhetorical question.

Now you two have to tell me. I definitely wasn't salty.

Three forwarded some excerpts about the funeral rituals from different parts of Corporate Rim, then some an article on how it functioned as a structure for processing grief. We assembled a query to run through our media storages. (I was glad to learn that Three also had some movies on it, even though they pretended to be real biographies).

The query came up with a lot of snippets and scenes, which ART and Three watched behind their muting feed-veil (I could still sort of watch it without the sound, but it wasn't the same, so: assholes) and then assembled a list, blacking out the options that weren't possible in our situation or engaged anatomical parts we didn't have.

The ditch got approved of. Apparently I was lying the wrong side up, but I countered the demand that I turn over with evidence that any movement in a grave is considered a bad omen, and traditionally precedes a zombie virus outburst. We searched the media for any mentions of zombie SecUnits, but nothing hit, so I won and got to stay put.

Three tried to compose me a eulogy. It sucked. ART told me I wasn't supposed to have a say, but didn't stop me from editing huge chunks in and out. We all agreed that it didn't work as intended unless spoken out loud, and I didn't want anyone to speak out loud right now, and ART said that I'd ruin it by making snarky comments anyway. Then both of them urged me to read the definition of "peanut gallery".

The only thing I was supposed to get a say in was, apparently, my last will. Which i didn't have until this moment, so I created a read-only list in another shared workspace which Three had agreed to host (I didn't trust ART not to hack and edit it once I turned away). First, the destiny of my media storage was decided: the whole archive of my favorite shows went to ART. It seemed so pleased about it that from that moment on every time it argued with me I moved one item from that section over to Ratthi's.

Your resident cabin is technically a part of my body, so you can't leave it to Three, told me ART. That cost it one season of Timestream Defenders Orion.

You're literally calling it mine, I said. Also, we have to store the remains of my body somewhere.

Perhaps you want to leave those to Three? 

I don't mind not being included. We didn't know each other for that long, said Three, dangling its legs over the edge of my ditch. I put my drones under its name in my will anyway.

Nope, ART, they're all yours. I want my cheap, shitty robotic parts lying on your perfectly polished floors in a messy pile, preferably for eternity. You're not getting rid of me.

ART was quiet for a moment. Whichever feeling it was hiding from me at that moment, it was being very careful not to leak it into the feed. May I do some... experiments on them?

Before I could fully consider it, Three asked: Is your buffer offline?

I scoffed into the dirt. I wish. Why?

Three forwarded a message to me. A transcript of Iris going "It didn't say the buffer phrase! The annoying one, you know, 'Woe, I'm too broken, the Company recommends that you leave me here to get eaten…'"

Well, I actually didn't. Probably because my diagnostics saw no problem, so there was nothing to trigger my buffer. I was supposedly fine. Just dying.

Are you really live streaming my death to our humans?

Negative, said Three. I'm only sending them the text logs.

Ugh. Three kept finding annoying applications for its free will. I wanted to tell it not to do that, but I suppose it wouldn't matter soon.

Deep inside I knew that my organic brain would be the death of me. Sure, I didn't expect it to kill me so suddenly and literally. But it turns out some optimistic part of me had hoped for a more dignified death. On a heroic retrieval of someone like Mensah, maybe, at the very end, to ensure its success. I surely didn't imagine laying there on some planet with stupid speeches spoken over me, alone except for Three, and ART still in my feed, and more ART in my drones, and our humans probably speeding up towards me in their (ART's) shuttle.

…This turned out to be a whole list. I felt some way about it.

(I didn't actually want to die.)

Can I see your face? Please.

I tried to get myself in the view of a drone, but instead just kind of bonked it against the ground a few times. I sighed, but decided that ART asking me nicely warranted me rotating in my grave, and turned to lie on my back. Then I opened my eyes and saw nothing.

Above me there was nothing but the sky — a lofty sky, weirdly greenish, but so quiet. Peaceful. Empty.

Hi.

Because it of course wasn't empty. ART was up there, gliding somewhere above the atmosphere, unseen, but always there for me.

I weakly moved my hand instead of a wave. It was a stupid urge, ART wouldn't have seen even full-on jumping waving from the orbit. But a moment later I felt the ART-controlled drone settle on my finger.

Nothing happened for a while. I was drifting like the clouds, ignoring my pains along with the rest of me.

Then Three raised its head and declared: It is a migraine.

There was a bright flash of relief from ART, even as horror and disgust filled me.

On one hand, that solved some of the mystery of my death. On the other, I'd rather have died in peace without imagining organic parts of my limbs and organs going gradually nasty, black and rotting—

ART flung two word definitions into my feed. One for "migraine", another for "gangrene", and oh. Thank fuck that Three actually meant that first one.

I read the correct definition and frowned. Seems wrong. Migrainey humans usually complain, but don't get sent to medbay and just keep working. Or saving spaceships, if its fiction.

That's because Corporate Rim's health standards are abysmal, said Iris with poorly contained anger. (I should probably check my other feeds instead of reading whatever Three forwarded and/or annotated for me.) Did anything like this happen on your mission?

Of course humans had been stubbornly trying to figure this one out. I looked dizzily through the list of the common migraine triggers that she sent us. It was impressively long. That is. Everything that ever happens.

ART shoved me aside in the feed and converted the list into a group of queries, then ran them all through the stolen footage of the last useful hours of my life. As it went, ART highlighted relevant lines in the list. Apparently, there was a lot of matches. To be fair, the targets did get creative on my way out.

I pulled our team feed to the front of my workspace, and it turned out that the humans were watching the progress on the list as well. Tarik was asking: Rapidly flashing light? Where did it go to, to a club?

I sent all the lights in their server room into a demo mode, modified and sped up, I said. It disoriented them without setting off alarms.

It disoriented you as well, dumbass. Welcome back.

ART kept mercilessly going, highlighting prolonged exposure to loud sounds (the alarm did go off eventually), strong chemical smells (I melted down their servers, what did you expect) and dehydration (for some reason?..).

Guess I might not be parting with my media archive, after all.

Still. Are you sure that's what it is?

Do you also experience any phantom smells?

"No," I said into the dirt. "This field just stinks."

"It doesn't", nodded Three and crept towards me.

I only managed to say "don't you dare" before it hoisted me up. The pain almost blinded me again, but instead of tragic it now felt stupid. I felt stupid. And a bit like I was still dying, especially when Three took off through the field with me scowling over its shoulder.

But I wasn't dying.
(Except maybe of embarrassment.)

***

 "This is not a real treatment," I said through the wet cloth on my face. It wasn't ART's idea, the humans tried to get my head covered with random fabric items as soon as I was within their reach in the shuttle, but I really thought that ART knew better.

Yet here I was, in a high-end medbay on a research spaceship, with all lights in it switched off, brown noise hissing from every corner and a medical drone fussing near my gurney to keep the thing on my face moisturized. It was plaing stupid.

"Shush," ART said through the speakers in the gurney. "To speed up your healing you are supposed to spend some time in utter silence."

"You just want me to stop complaining."

"Oh no, I actually love it when you complain."

I frowned, and the medical drone adjusted the wet cloth. "Really?"

"Yes," the innocence in its voice was definitely fake. "It tends to give exciting insights about your mind."

I shut up, grumpily. For a little bit. This was the most boring visit to a medbay in my life, and while it was undeniably a good thing, it still annoyed me to no end.

(I could probably just turn myself off for a while, but I suspected the sight of my lifeless body in the medbay would be upsetting to half the spaceship at the moment. Including the spaceship.)

So I resumed the only entertainment that I was allowed.

"No, seriously, your medical protocols are lacking here. This is bullshit." 

"Shush!" ART repeated, not even trying to hide its glee.

 (The downside to living: I might have to inspect some of my previous feelings, after all.)

(I moved that task far down my backlog.)