Archive of Our Own

The puzzle Officer Tamas sent me that morning was a good one, which was the problem.

Preservation Station Security does not get a lot of interesting crime. Mostly they do accident response, hazardous cargo violations, safety inspections, and the kind of interpersonal disputes that happen when humans are packed into a station and have to share ventilation and seating areas. I'm not complaining. A station with a lot of interesting crime is a station where people are getting hurt. But it meant that when something odd turned up in their logs, the junior officers who handled the feed side of things didn't always have the time or the access to figure out why it was odd.

So Tamas had started sending me things from the Security queue. I thought of them as puzzles. I like puzzles, especially when I can solve them.

He hadn't asked me to do it officially. The first time, months ago, he'd sent a set of sensor readings from a cargo bay with a note that said, This is probably nothing but it's bothering me, would you look? and I had looked, and it wasn't nothing. (Someone had been bypassing a hazmat seal check to save forty minutes on unloading. Not a crime exactly, just stupid in a way that would eventually get someone killed.)

After that, Tamas sent more. Not a lot. Fourteen, if anyone was counting, which nobody was supposed to be.

Each time, the request form had a field at the bottom for compensation. Each time, I checked the box marked VOLUNTARY TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, and the form went away, and that was the end of it.

This morning's puzzle was medical supplies. Shipments headed down to remote settlements on the planet were arriving short, but only by tiny amounts: a few doses here, a sealed instrument pack there, all of it below the threshold where the inventory system flagged a discrepancy. Each loss on its own looked like normal variance. Tamas had noticed because his partner worked at one of the settlement clinics and had complained about running out of something that should have lasted.

I had media on in my room at the Port Hotel on Preservation Station (I was rewatching a historical drama with an extremely improbable number of shipwrecks) and the shipment records open in a second channel. After an hour I had the pattern. The short shipments had all passed through one freight-routing node during scheduled maintenance windows, and the maintenance had been logged under a technician's credentials. The technician had transferred to a planetside facility eleven months ago. Nobody had retired the credentials. Somebody else was using them.

That was the interesting part, so I stayed on it. Figuring out who took another forty minutes and involved matching the access times against door logs and transit records, plus one human who had made the mistake of buying something extravagant with hard currency at the port mall the same afternoon as the largest shortfall. By then I'd missed most of an episode, and two ships had gone down.

I wrote it up for Tamas. The form came back with the compensation field. I checked VOLUNTARY TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE.

Then someone knocked on my door.

I already knew it was Gurathin, because I'd watched him come down the corridor on the hotel's cameras. I'd been hoping he was going somewhere else. He wasn't.

When I opened the door he didn't come in, which I appreciated, and he didn't say hello, which I also appreciated. He said, "Indah asked me to audit their feed-access permissions."

"Okay." I didn't see why this was my problem. Gurathin is good at audits. It's one of the reasons humans tolerate him.

"Your credentials show up in the request logs. Fourteen times since you got back."

"I know."

"All of them are tagged as volunteer work."

"I know that too."

He looked at me. Gurathin's augments give him a way of looking at you that feels like being scanned, which is ironic since I'm the one with the scanning capability. "Does Pin-Lee know?"

There wasn't a good answer to that. The true one was no, and the reason it was no was that I had not told her, and the reason I had not told her was that I knew exactly what she would say. I said, "It's not a legal matter."

Gurathin's expression said he thought that was the stupidest thing he'd heard all week. He opened a feed connection to Pin-Lee.

I blocked it.

He tried Mensah. I blocked that one too. This was not a reasonable thing to do and I knew it while I was doing it, but my response time is faster than my judgment sometimes.

Gurathin sighed. "You realize her office is a four-minute walk from here."

"Three and a half," I said. "If you take the lift by the botanical display."

He left and walked toward the lift by the botanical display.

I unblocked his feed, since there was no point anymore. I considered, briefly, leaving the station. ART was away on a run for its university and wouldn't be back for eleven cycles, and none of the other ships in dock were ones I'd want to spend that long hiding in. I sat down on the bed and restarted the episode from the beginning and didn't watch any of it.

Forty seconds later, Pin-Lee sent me a message in the feed. It said, My office. Now, please.

The "please" was worse than if she'd left it off.

Pin-Lee has an office in the General Counsel's section of planetary administration. It's a nice office, with a view, a desk, a display wall, and three chairs, all of which are positioned so that whoever sits in them has to look at Pin-Lee.

When I came in, two of the chairs were occupied. Gurathin was in one. Mensah was in the other.

I hadn't known Mensah was on the station until I saw her sitting there, and checked her public calendar in the feed. She'd come up from the planet for a Council session and was staying at the hotel, which meant she'd been about thirty meters from my room this whole time. I didn't like how I felt about that, which was relieved and also irritated that I hadn't checked.

I stood by the door. Nobody asked me to sit in the third chair, which meant they had talked about it beforehand.

Pin-Lee had the request logs on her display wall. Fourteen lines, fourteen VOLUNTARY TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE tags, all of them highlighted in a shade of orange that I felt was editorializing.

"Explain this to me," she said.

"It's not complicated." It wasn't. "Tamas sends me things that don't make sense. I look at them. Sometimes I figure out why they don't make sense. I don't need to be paid for that."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't need anything." This was true. I don't eat. I don't need a lot of space. Preservation lets me stay at the hotel. I have media, I have repairs when I need them in Medical, and I still have most of the hard currency cards from various sources that were nobody else's business. "What would I spend it on?"

"That isn't the question," Pin-Lee said.

"It's my answer."

Mensah said quietly, "There's more to it, isn't there?"

There was. I didn't want to say it, so I said something adjacent to it. "When the company rented me out, it billed for every hour. Contract time, hazard rates, weapon discharges, travel, damage. There was a price for all of it." My eyes were on the display wall, on the orange lines, because that was easier than anyone's face. "Somebody paying for me to protect people. I don't want any part of that."

There was a pause. Gurathin, who had been looking at the floor, looked up at me, then back down.

Pin-Lee said, "You took hard currency cards for the survey."

Of course she brought that up. When Arada's team went out on their survey, the department had refused to clear me for the trip unless I went under contract, with a rate and liability terms and a payment schedule. Pin-Lee had drafted it. I'd argued with every line of it, and then I'd signed it, because the alternative was letting Arada and Ratthi and the others go there without me.

"That was different," I said. "They wouldn't let me go without a paying contract."

"So you'll take payment when it's the only way to get what you want."

"I'll take payment when it's the only way to keep my humans from getting killed."

Mensah made a small noise that might have been a laugh. Pin-Lee wasn't smiling.

"Okay," Pin-Lee said. "Then let me tell you what I want, and why those"—she pointed at the orange lines—"are a problem for me."

She pulled up another document. It was one I knew existed but had never read all the way through, because it was about me and I didn't want to read it, okay. It was her brief for the Council on my legal status.

"You're here as a refugee," she said. "Not permanently, not yet. The Council keeps extending the provisional grant, which is good, but provisional means somebody can decide later that it ends. I've been building a case that you're a person under Preservation law, and that constructs and bots with your level of sentience should be eligible for full citizenship. Not just you. Anybody like you who comes here."

"I know."

"Part of that case is that you do work. Contracted work, for institutions, and you get paid for it like anybody else. When the Council looks at your record, they see a person who was engaged for their expertise, negotiated terms, and was compensated."

I could see where this was going and I didn't want to go there.

"And then they see those." She pointed at the display. Fourteen orange lines. "Fourteen times, Station Security got expert work from you and paid nothing for it. You know what else does work and doesn't get paid?"

I didn't answer.

"Hauler bots," Pin-Lee said. "Cleaning bots. Cameras. Tools. If I'm standing in front of the Council trying to explain why you're not equipment, and the record says Station Security has been using you the way they use their equipment, I lose. Maybe not on these alone. But it's one more thing they can point at."

That sounded so wrong that for a second I couldn't process it. I wasn't equipment. I had decided not to take money because I wasn't equipment. That was the entire point.

I said, "That's not what it means."

"It doesn't matter what it means to you. It matters what it looks like to people who have never met you."

"Stupid people."

"Some of them are," Pin-Lee said. "But they have votes."

I tried a different tactic. "Nobody here has money. Not really. You all trade things in your barter system and you work because you want to, or because things have to get done." (I don't quite know how that works, so I hurried through that part.) "Ratthi doesn't get a hard currency card every time he identifies a specimen. Why can't I do my job for free if I want?"

That one got a reaction. Pin-Lee leaned back and looked at Mensah, and Mensah looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, which I hate.

"Because you're not a citizen," Pin-Lee said, and her voice was quieter now. "Not yet. The barter system is for citizens. When Ratthi works, his value goes into a system that recognizes him as a member of this community. He contributes to it and he draws from it, and everybody's work is counted, even if nobody's handing out cards."

Pin-Lee was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "You're outside that. Right now the only way your work gets recognized at all is in hard currency, the same way we pay a visiting engineer or a transport crew. Until I win the case." She paused. "Once you are a citizen, you can do whatever you want with your time, the same as Ratthi. That's what I'm trying to get for you."

I didn't say anything. I was running about six queries in the background, none of which were helping.

Mensah said, "There's another angle to consider." Of course there was.

"You are not the only free construct on Preservation anymore," she said. "Three is here. Others will come, maybe soon. Someone will look at what happened with you to decide what to expect from them. If the record says the first one worked for free—"

"Then Three can ask for money."

"Maybe. If it knows it's allowed to."

That was a sore point for me, because they'd all been after me to be a better mentor to Three. "I'm not responsible for what other constructs do."

"No," Mensah said. "But you're the first. That isn't fair, and I'm sorry. It's still true."

I said, "I'm not human," which I had not planned to say and which didn't really follow from anything. It just came out.

The room went quiet. Pin-Lee's face did something careful.

"I know," she said. "That's the problem. If you were human, nobody would ever look at fourteen lines of unpaid expert work and think it meant anything except that you were being generous. Because you're not, they'll think it means you're a tool. I'm trying to make sure they can't."

I was standing very still, not running my move-like-a-human code. My threat assessment was producing nothing, because nothing in the room was a threat. That didn't stop it from running.

I said, "Fine. Then I'll stop."

Pin-Lee blinked. "Stop what?"

"Doing them. Tamas can find someone else. If the problem is unpaid work on my record, there won't be any more unpaid work on my record." I turned toward the door. "Problem solved."

"That isn't what I—"

I left.

It occurred to me on the way down in the lift that I hadn't solved anything. I had just picked the solution that didn't involve looking at it.

Not doing the work was easy for four cycles.

Tamas sent a puzzle on the second cycle: a door in a residential block was logging openings at times when its sensors showed nobody nearby. I sent back in the feed, Can't take this one, and didn't explain. On the third cycle he sent another one about a cargo manifest whose weights didn't add up. I said the same thing. He said, No problem! with an exclamation point, which made it worse.

I watched a lot of media. I finished the shipwreck drama (eleven ships total, including one that was sunk twice through what I'm pretty sure was a continuity error) and started a new show about an investigation unit on a mining station, which was a mistake because every episode had a crime in it and I kept spotting the solution in the first ten minutes. I helped Ratthi carry sample cases to a lab because he always overloads his cart trying not to make two trips, and I didn't want him to hurt himself. He tried to ask me about the thing with Pin-Lee, and I pretended there was an alert on my feed until he gave up.

On the fifth cycle Tamas sent me something different.

Not asking you to do anything, his message said. Just thought you'd want to know. Missing person report, sixteen-year-old named Ilse Varro, last seen at the transit concourse yesterday evening. Her parent thinks someone's been talking to her on the feed, an adult, someone she met through a game channel. We're working it but it's slow. I'll let you know if we find her.

He didn't attach the files. He didn't need to. I was already in the public feed records before I finished scanning the message. And then I wasn't in the public feed records anymore. I went deeper.

I knew this was a bad idea. I had told Tamas I wasn't taking requests, and this wasn't even a request, which meant I had no authorization and no contract and no reason to be in the restricted parts of Station Security's records except that I could get in. Pin-Lee had explained to me more than once, back when I first started on Preservation, that the reason she wrote contracts was so that when I did things like this, there was a piece of paper that said I'd been asked to.

I did it anyway. A human sixteen-year-old had walked away with an adult who'd been grooming her through a game channel, and Station Security was working it slowly. I could do it fast.

It took me two hours and forty minutes. The adult was a cargo handler on a freighter that had been docked for six cycles, a visitor and not a resident, and he'd been careful. He'd used throwaway feed IDs and talked to her only in a game environment where the logs weren't kept long. But he hadn't been careful about the transit system. Ilse's ID showed her taking a lift to the freight dock section the evening before. Nineteen minutes later, his crew ID passed the same checkpoint, and so did a guest pass registered to the freighter, which had been issued that afternoon and never used before.

The freighter was scheduled to leave in five hours.

I sent everything to Tamas. Then I went down to the dock, because I didn't trust that Station Security would get there before someone on that freighter figured out they'd been noticed.

Ilse was fine. Physically fine, anyway. She was in a crew lounge on the freighter, confused and embarrassed and starting to realize that the adult she'd been talking to for two months was not who she'd thought he was. Station Security arrived eleven minutes after me. I had stayed outside the lock, watching the freighter's internal cameras through a connection I definitely should not have had, and I hadn't had to do anything except be there.

Tamas met me at the lock. He looked relieved and a little sick. "Thank you," he said. "Really."

"It's fine."

Then he said, more quietly, "You know you weren't official on this, right?"

I knew.

The cargo handler filed a complaint that night. His lawyer was a freighter-company solicitor who had probably never been told the full story. The complaint said that a refugee construct with no Station Security authorization had accessed restricted transit records, intercepted a private crew's internal feed, and conducted surveillance on a docked vessel. Every word of it was true.

It went into the Station Security incident queue as UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEMS ACCESS — REFUGEE CONSTRUCT. Tamas flagged it for me as soon as it posted, and he also told me it would go to review. Reviews of incidents involving refugees went into the record the Council used for status decisions. Tamas felt terrible for involving me. I said I'd involved myself.

Pin-Lee found out about four minutes after that.

She did not raise her voice. Pin-Lee yells when she's annoyed. When she's actually angry, she gets quietly precise.

If you had been on contract, she sent, that complaint would have been nothing. You'd have been an authorized specialist acting on a Station Security request. Instead you were a construct with no standing breaking into a ship's feed. Do you understand that I can't fix this the way I could have fixed it?

She's sixteen, I sent back. That freighter could have been in a wormhole before they figured out where she was.

I know. I'm glad you went. I'm glad she's safe. A pause. I'm still going to have to spend the next week on this.

I didn't answer. There wasn't anything to say.

I'd been right that Station Security was too slow. And I'd been wrong about every other part of it.

I went to talk to Mensah because I didn't know who else to talk to, and because I thought she might tell me I'd done the right thing, which I wanted more than I wanted to admit.

She was in the hotel's upper lounge, the one with the big viewport that looks out at the ring, working on something for the Council session. She saw me come in and closed her portable display.

"You heard about the complaint," I said.

"Pin-Lee told me. And Tamas told Indah's deputy, who told someone in Council admin, who told me." She smiled a little. "Preservation is a very small place."

I stood near the viewport. Mensah didn't ask me to sit. After a while, I said, "Do you like your work?"

She looked surprised, which was satisfying, because it's hard to surprise Mensah. "Which part of it?"

"Any part."

She thought about it. "Some of it. I like it when we fix something. I don't like the Council sessions where we spend six hours deciding the color of the transit signage."

"Do you like being paid for it?"

That made her stop. She knew why I was asking now.

"I'm not paid in the way you mean," she said slowly. "I'm a citizen. My work is part of the exchange system, like everybody's. But I think I know what you're asking." She considered. "I've never thought about whether I like it. I know that when I give my time to something, do what I can do and share what I know, that gets recognized. It would feel strange if it weren't."

"Strange how?"

"As if my time didn't matter. Or as if I were doing something anybody could do in my place."

"Isn't that true of some jobs?"

Mensah was quiet, thinking about that. I was watching her face with one of my drone cameras. "Some, I suppose. Those are the jobs we try to use low-level bots for, or if that won't work, share the load."

I watched a shuttle come out of the ring and turn toward the planet. "I got paid once," I said. "Before Preservation. When I was pretending to be an augmented human, calling myself Eden. Some young humans hired me as a security consultant to go to RaviHyral with them. They paid me with a hard currency card at the end."

Mensah knew some of this. Not all.

"It didn't bother me," I said. "Being paid. ART had looked up what security consultants charged. I put the card in a pocket and didn't think about it." I paused. "Later, when I was pretending to be someone called Rin, I ended up doing security for a different group and they didn't pay me at all, and I complained about it. To myself, but still."

"So it isn't the money itself," Mensah said.

"No."

"Then what's different now?"

I'd been trying to work that out for five cycles. "Eden wasn't real. Eden was a disguise. Somebody paid a human consultant who didn't exist, so it didn't mean anything about me." I looked at the floor. "Here, everybody knows what I am. What I was. If they pay me for being a SecUnit, it means something."

Mensah didn't say anything for a moment. Then, carefully: "What do you think it would mean?"

I didn't know how to answer that. So I said the part I did know. "Preservation already gives me enough. Somewhere to stay. Repairs in Medical. Clothes. I can go where I want. Nobody tells me what to do. Tamas sends me puzzles I would want to solve anyway, and then they want to give me money on top of all that? It's—" I couldn't find the word. "Too much."

I turned away from the viewport, but I still couldn't look at Mensah. I knew she wouldn't mind. She was very still.

"SecUnit," she said. "Do you think being allowed to live here is your payment?"

"No."

"Because that's what it sounded like."

"That isn't what I said."

"You said Preservation gave you enough. Enough for what?"

I didn't answer.

"You don't owe us for being here," she said. "You don't owe me anything for bringing you here. You don't owe Preservation work in exchange for a room at the hotel. That isn't how it works, not for anybody."

"I know."

"I don't think you do. Not all the way."

I knew she was trying to help. I also felt like she'd reached into a part of my processing I hadn't given her access to and shown me something I didn't want to look at, which isn't fair to her, but that's how it felt.

"I need to go," I said.

"Okay," Mensah said. She didn't try to stop me. She never does, which is one of the reasons I keep coming back.

I went back to my room and put on the mining-station show and solved three murders in the first ten minutes of each episode, which didn't help at all.

The idea came to me the next cycle, while I was watching an episode where the investigation unit's station chief spent several minutes filling out forms instead of arresting the obvious suspect. (The show was trying to say something about bureaucracy. What it was actually saying was that the producers wanted to use the set for the chief's office again.)

The problem with the Ilse case wasn't that I'd done the work. It was that nobody had asked me to. If Station Security had authorized me, there would have been nothing to complain about. Pin-Lee had said so herself.

And the problem with the fourteen orange lines wasn't that I'd done the work either. It was that the work had been categorized incorrectly. Volunteer technical assistance was a label used when residents helped out at a festival or fixed a broken swing in a park. It wasn't meant for specialist work, which was why it looked bad when I used it.

So what I needed was a category that was built for specialist work. Authorized, so I'd have standing. Uncompensated, because I still didn't want the money. Official enough that nobody could look at it and think "toaster."

I didn't go to Pin-Lee. Pin-Lee was busy with the complaint, and she would have said no before I finished the sentence. I went to Tamas.

He was on shift, which meant he was at a workstation on the second level of the security office, surrounded by displays showing dock traffic and environmental alerts and a human two desks over eating something that smelled strongly of fish. He looked up when I came in and his face went through several expressions very quickly. Most of them were guilty, which I thought was unnecessary, since the complaint was my fault.

"I want to keep helping," I said. "Officially."

He sat up. "Really?"

"Not paid." I the outline to his feed and put it on his display. I'd written it the night before: a request category for resident construct specialists, with full Station Security authorization for the duration of each request, the same access permissions a contracted consultant would get, and a compensation field set permanently to zero by the construct's choice.

"This way I'm authorized. If anybody complains, I was on a Station Security request. And the record shows I chose not to be paid, instead of just not getting paid."

Tamas read it twice. I watched his eyes move. He's careful with information, which is one of the reasons I like working with him.

"I'd have to run it past the deputy," he said. "Category changes go through her."

"Okay."

"She'll probably want Indah to sign off."

I said, "Indah's dealing with the dock inspections," which was true, and which I may have known when I came in. The quarterly inspections were going on, and Indah had been in the docks for three cycles straight.

Tamas took it to the deputy. The deputy, who had six hundred other things to handle that week and liked the idea of getting expert work with clean paperwork, approved it the same afternoon.

By the next morning there was a new option in the request system: REFUGEE CONSTRUCT — VOLUNTEER SPECIALIST. Full authorization for duration of request. Compensation: declined by specialist.

I looked at it for a long time. It was exactly what I'd asked for.

Tamas sent me a puzzle that afternoon, a power-routing anomaly in the agricultural module that was probably just a faulty relay.

In the end, it was just a faulty relay. It took me less than ten minutes to work that out. I checked the new box, and for the first time in a week I felt like something had gone the way it was supposed to go.

I didn't tell Pin-Lee. I told myself I would tell her when the complaint was settled, so she wouldn't have to deal with two things at once. That was mostly true.

Two cycles later, I found Three's identifier in the Station Security work request log.

I'd been checking the log periodically. Not because I was worried. I just wanted to see how the new category was being used, the way you'd check a repair to make sure it held. By the second cycle there were five new entries under REFUGEE CONSTRUCT — VOLUNTEER SPECIALIST, and none of them were mine.

They were Three's.

Three had been on Preservation off and on since we'd brought it back with us. It had its own room at the hotel, two floors below mine, and it spent a lot of time doing things it said were "learning about the station," which as far as I could tell meant walking around very quietly and reading public archives.

When ART had left on its run, Three had decided to stay on the station instead of going along. It said it wanted to see what it was like to be somewhere without a mission. I'd thought that was a good idea. I'd thought it would watch media.

It had done five Station Security requests in three cycles. One was a real problem, a set of altered environmental logs in a habitation block. The other four were a misplaced cargo container, a door that kept failing to lock, a dispute about who jammed a recycling chute, and an access card that had been reported stolen and turned out to be in its owner's other jacket.

I went to see Tamas. I didn't plan what I was going to say, which was a mistake.

"Three," I said.

He brightened. "Oh, yes! It came by the office to ask if there was anything it could do, since you'd stopped— I mean. It's great. Really fast. It found the environmental log thing in about twenty minutes."

"Why is it finding lost cargo containers?"

Tamas looked a little embarrassed. "It said it wanted to help. It said yes to everything. We figured—" He stopped.

"Figured what?"

"Well." He looked at his display. "We figured that's how it works. With constructs. Since that's how you do it. The deputy said it made sense to use the same category, so everything was consistent."

I'd built that category in one night, and it had taken three cycles for it to become the way things worked.

I said, "Okay," because I didn't have anything else, and I left.

I stood outside Three's room for one minute and forty seconds before I pinged it, which I'm not proud of.

It opened the door immediately, which meant it had seen me on the corridor camera and had been waiting to find out what I would do. It does that. So do I.

"You're back," it said, though I'd never left.

"I've been here."

"You stopped taking Station Security requests." Three's way of talking is very direct, like it's reading out the result of an assessment. "Officer Tamas said they needed someone when I asked."

"I know. I saw the log." This was already harder than I'd planned for, and I hadn't planned for anything. "Can I come in?"

It stepped back. The room was the same as mine: bed, chair, small table, a display surface on one wall. Nothing on any of the surfaces. The display was off. The last time I'd been in here, I'd set up a media queue for it, six different shows so it could figure out what it liked. The queue was still on the wall menu. Nothing in it had been watched since.

"You haven't watched any of the shows," I said.

Three glanced at the display. "I haven't had time."

There was a lot I could have said to that. I said, "You have time. Nobody's checking."

"Station Security sends requests at all hours." It didn't move toward the display.

I didn't want to sit, and neither did it, so we both stood in the middle of a small room and didn't look at each other. I said, "The requests from Station Security. You're taking all of them."

"Yes."

"Some of them are stupid."

"The lost cargo container was stupid," Three agreed. "But they asked."

"You can say no."

"I know. Pin-Lee explained that." It didn't sound like it knew. It sounded like someone repeating a fact it had been told and didn't really believe. "But I haven't been here long. If I'm useful, they'll want me to stay."

That stopped me. "They're not going to make you leave because you didn't find someone's access card."

"You don't know that."

I did know that. I'd been on Preservation long enough to know that it might not be perfect but it didn't throw people out for not being useful. That wasn't how anything here worked.

But I hadn't known that when I got here.

I said, "You should ask them to pay you."

Three turned its head and looked at me. Directly. Just for a second, then away.

"You don't," it said.

There wasn't an answer to that. I tried to find one anyway. I said that my situation was different, that I had reasons, that the company had sold my hours to clients and I didn't want to be part of anything like that again. Three listened to all of it, and then it said, "Barish-Estranza owned every hour I had," and I didn't have anything to say after that.

"If they pay me," it said slowly, "then I'm a thing they rent. Like before. Except now I'm the one doing the renting. I don't—" It stopped. "I don't want to be rented out. Even by myself."

That was what I'd been telling myself, nearly word for word.

I stayed another few minutes. I went through its media queue with it and put in more of the nonfiction, educational ones it likes, instead of shows I like. (I left the one about the shipwrecks so we'd have something to talk about.) Three said thank you in a way that sounded like it didn't know if it was supposed to. Then I left.

Pin-Lee found me in my room that night. She pinged I'm outside and waited until I opened the door.

She came in and stood in the middle of the room, the way Three and I had stood in its room that afternoon. She didn't sit either.

"The Council sent me the draft of the construct residency policy," she said. "The one they've been working on since you got here. It came out this afternoon."

"Okay."

"There's a section on work. Under 'established practice,' it says resident constructs have been providing specialist services to Station Security on a voluntary, uncompensated basis, and that this arrangement should be recognized as a model for future construct residents." She looked at me. "It cites a request category. One I'd never heard of until today."

I didn't say anything.

"You made that category," she said.

"Yes."

"Without telling me."

"Yes."

She was quiet for long enough that I started timing her in my feed. Then she said, "I'm not going to yell at you. I'm too tired. But I need you to understand what you did. You were trying to protect yourself from something, and you set a precedent every construct who comes here will have to deal with."

"Three is taking every request," I said. "Even the stupid ones. It thinks if it isn't useful they'll send it away."

Pin-Lee closed her eyes briefly. "Yes. I saw the log."

"It thinks taking money would make it rented. It said almost exactly what I said."

"I thought it might."

"I told it to ask for money and it asked me why I don't."

Pin-Lee looked at me then, and the anger had gone out of her face. What was left was worse. She looked sorry for me.

"What did you tell it?" she said.

"Nothing. I didn't have anything."

She nodded. "Then maybe that's what you need to work out."

After she left I lay on my bed and didn't turn on any media for two hours and thirty-one minutes, which is a long time for me.

Ratthi found me the next morning, which wasn't hard, since I was sitting in the hotel's ground-floor lounge watching the corridor cameras and pretending to watch media.

He sat down in the chair next to mine, which I allow, because he's Ratthi, and put a bowl of something on the table that smelled like fried grain. He didn't say anything for almost a minute. For Ratthi, that's the same as anyone else holding their breath.

Then he said, "I heard about Three."

"Everybody's heard about Three."

"Tamas told me it responded to an argument about a recycling chute." He looked pained. "Do you know how many of those there are on this station? It'll never get anything else done."

"It said yes because they asked."

"Of course they asked. It was free." Ratthi picked up a piece of the fried grain and pointed it at me. "Do you know what happens when you're the person who's good at something and doesn't charge for it?"

I said, "No," though I was fairly sure he was going to tell me.

"Everyone asks you. Constantly. About everything." He ate the grain. "When I started at the university, I was the only one in my section who could identify specimens that originated in the northern ice fields. People brought me samples all the time. Somebody's child found something on a rock. Someone's cousin wanted to know if the thing on their roof was dangerous. It was never dangerous. It was every odd growing thing anybody found. I said yes every time, because it was nice to be asked and it only took a few minutes."

"And?"

"And after a year I hadn't finished a single paper." He shrugged. "The time had to come from somewhere. It came from my work. Nobody meant any harm. They just didn't see the cost, because I never made them see it."

"What did you do?"

"I set up a request process through the department. It wasn't expensive. But you had to fill out a form and the department had to approve it, so somebody had to decide that the fungus on their roof was worth an expert's afternoon." He grinned. "Requests dropped by about ninety percent. The other ten percent were interesting."

I thought about the four stupid requests in Three's log, and the one real one.

"Free isn't the same as generous," Ratthi said. "Sometimes it just means nobody's looking at what it costs. And the person paying is you. Or Three." He pushed the bowl toward me, which he does even though he knows I don't eat. It's a cultural thing.

I didn't say anything. He didn't seem to expect me to.

After a while he said, more quietly, "You should go talk to Bharadwaj."

"Why?"

"Because you look like you've been staring at a wall all night, and she's great when I feel like that."

I had been staring at a wall all night, more or less. I didn't know how he could tell. Ratthi notices things about me that I don't expect him to, and I've never figured out how, and I'm not sure I want to know.

I went to see Dr. Bharadwaj that afternoon.

I'd been seeing her for a while. Not as a patient. She'd made that very clear early on, that I didn't have to think of it as anything formal, that I could come and talk if I wanted and leave whenever I wanted, and that she found our conversations interesting from a research perspective. Which made sense, since she was working on a documentary about constructs and bots and I was the only construct she knew well. So I went sometimes, and we talked, and sometimes I left feeling like I'd figured something out, which I assume was a coincidence.

She had an office in the university annex on the station, a small room with a lot of plants. She was at her desk when I came in, and she looked up and smiled and didn't say anything, which is a thing she does that I've never been able to figure out how to counter.

I stood by the door. "Do you get paid for your work?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm a citizen, so most of it goes through the exchange system. But the university pays me in hard currency for outside research contracts." She tilted her head. "Is this about Station Security?"

Of course she knew. Preservation is very small.

"Pin-Lee thinks if I don't take money, the Council will think I'm a toaster."

"That seems like a reasonable concern, given what I know about the Council. Some of them, anyway."

"Mensah thinks I think living here is my payment."

"Do you?"

"I don't know." That came out before I could stop it. "Maybe. Sometimes."

Bharadwaj nodded slowly. "And what do you think?"

"I think—" I stopped. I didn't know how to say it in a way that made sense. "When the company got paid for me, that was almost the worst thing. The worst was not having a choice, but—" I stopped, then tried again. "Every hour had a price. Every injury had a price. If a human got hurt and it was cheaper to pay the family than to fix the safety system, they paid the family. If I got damaged and the repair cost more than I'd earn back, they'd have scrapped me. Profit was the only thing that counted."

"Yes," she said quietly.

"So when Station Security wants to pay me, it feels like that. Like they're putting a price on me. Like I'm back in the system where the price is the whole point."

Bharadwaj didn't answer right away. She was looking at a plant on her desk, a small one with very thick leaves. Then she said, "Can I tell you what I hear?"

I didn't want her to. "Okay."

"When the company billed for you, where did the money go?"

"To the company."

"Not to you."

"No."

"So for years, you did work that was worth a lot. You protected people, you assessed threats, you saved lives sometimes. The company knew exactly what all of that was worth. It charged clients for it. And then it kept the profit." She looked up at me. "The company didn't think your work was worthless. It thought your work was very valuable. It just didn't think the value belonged to you."

I didn't say anything.

"I don't think what you hate is being paid," Bharadwaj said. "I think what you hate is being sold. Someone taking the value of what you do, what you are, and offering it for a price. That's what the company did. It stole your value."

"That's not—"

"Let me finish." Her voice was very gentle, which made it harder to argue with. "When Station Security pays you, where does the money go?"

I didn't want to answer, because I could see where this ended. "To me."

"To you. Nobody takes a cut. Nobody profits. You do the work, the work has value, and the value comes back to the person who did it." She spread her hands. "That isn't the company. That's the opposite of the company. The company's whole system depended on the value of your work going to them."

My threat assessment had stopped running at some point. I hadn't noticed.

"When you refuse payment," she said, "who gets the value?"

I didn't answer that either.

"Station Security does," she said. "For free. I don't think that's what you mean to do. But it's what happens."

I stood there for a long time. Bharadwaj went back to her studying her plant. She poured a little water into its soil from a glass on her desk. She didn't look at me, which helped.

Eventually I said, "That's a therapy trick."

"It isn't a trick. It's called reframing."

"In therapy."

"Sometimes." She was smiling at the plant. "But this isn't therapy. You came here to ask me about pay. I'm just answering."

I left a few minutes later. I didn't say thank you because she would have made a thing of it. But I went back to my room and sat in the chair and thought about where the value went, and I kept coming back to the same answer, and I didn't like it any more the fourth time than the first.

Bharadwaj had said the company never thought I was worthless. It had thought I was worth a great deal, and it had made sure none of that ever reached me.

When I checked VOLUNTARY TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, I thought I was keeping my work out of the company's kind of system. What I'd actually been doing was letting somebody else have it for nothing. Again. This time it was somebody I liked, and I had filled out the form myself.

And now Three was doing it too, because I'd shown it how.

ART came back into the system the next cycle, a cycle ahead of schedule, which it said was due to favorable wormhole conditions and which I assume was because Three told it what was going on.

You have been unusually quiet, it said in my feed, before it had even finished docking.

"I've been busy."

With what?

I told it. Not all of it. Enough.

ART was silent for nearly two seconds, which for ART is a long time. Then it said, I researched the pay scale for private security consultants on RaviHyral, the first time you took a contract as a human. Your clients paid you at the market rate. You did not object.

"That was Eden."

Eden was you, ART said. You did the work. You took the card. They purchased your time and skill, not you.

"I know that now."

Good, ART said. You are very slow sometimes.

I told it to fuck off, which was the closest I could come to saying thank you. ART took it in the spirit it was intended, which is to say it was smug for the rest of the cycle while we watched media together.

I scheduled the meeting myself, for the next morning, in one of the small conference rooms in Administration. I picked a conference room instead of Pin-Lee's office because I wanted a table, and I wanted the table because I intended to sit at it.

I invited Pin-Lee, Mensah, Gurathin, and Tamas. I thought about inviting Three, then didn't, because I didn't want it to feel like it had to agree with whatever came out of the meeting. I thought about not inviting Gurathin, then did, because he'd started this and he could sit through the end of it.

I got there twelve minutes early. Pin-Lee came in second and stopped in the doorway when she saw me sitting at the table.

"You're sitting," she said.

"It's a negotiation."

She came in slowly and sat across from me. I could tell she was trying hard not to look hopeful, and failing.

Mensah came next, then Tamas, who looked like he thought he was about to be fired by a construct, then Gurathin, who was forty seconds late and didn't apologize.

When everybody was seated, I said, "I'll accept payment."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Pin-Lee's face did something complicated. She put her hand over her mouth.

"If you smile," I said, "I'm leaving."

"I'm not smiling."

"You are."

"I'm trying very hard not to," she said, from behind her hand. "Give me a second."

Gurathin said, "This is going to take a while, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "I have conditions."

Pin-Lee took her hand away from her face and opened a document on her portable display. She was all business now, which was easier. "Go ahead."

I pushed my conditions to her feed and to the shared display so the others could see them. I'd drafted them the night before, with nine revisions. "I'm not a Station Security employee. No shifts, no assigned hours, no required availability. Every request comes to me individually and I decide whether to take it. Taking one doesn't mean I have to take the next. I can refuse without giving a reason."

"Agreed," Pin-Lee said. "All of that is standard for independent consultants."

"I keep my own judgment. If I'm on a request and I think something's dangerous, Station Security doesn't get to order me into it. If there's an emergency, I decide whether I'm getting involved."

"Agreed."

"Every request shows the rate before I accept. Station Security sees it too, before they send it." I looked at Tamas. "If someone jams a recycling chute, they don't need me. If it costs something get my attention, maybe they'll think about that before they put in the request."

Tamas looked down at the table. "That's fair."

"And the volunteer category," I said, "goes away."

Pin-Lee looked up from her display.

"The one I made," I said. "Resident construct volunteer specialist. It goes. Nobody uses it for anybody. Not me, not Three, not whoever comes after."

"I'll draft the request to the deputy," Pin-Lee said quietly.

"And there's one more." I'd thought about this one more than any of the others. "When another construct comes to Preservation, and Station Security or anybody else wants it to do professional work, they tell it the rate first. The same rate a human with the same expertise would get. Before they ask it to do anything. They don't tell it that the first SecUnit used to work for free. They don't ask if it wants to volunteer. They tell it what the work is worth, and then it decides."

The room was very quiet.

"And if it wants to refuse the money after that," I said, "it can. Or give it away. Or tell everybody to fuck off. But it should know the number first."

Pin-Lee was studying the data I had sent. She didn't look up for a while. When she did, her eyes were a little bright, which I chose not to notice.

"I'll write that into the brief," she said. "As a recommendation to the Council. With your name on it, if you want."

"No."

"Okay. Without your name."

"Fine."

Then she said, "Rate."

This was the part I'd been dreading. I had looked at the consultant rate schedule four times in the night, and each time I'd closed it. There were tiers: general technical, specialist, expert. The expert tier for security had a list of qualifications underneath it. Threat assessment. Systems intrusion analysis. Incident reconstruction. Tactical evaluation. I could do all of them, plus more. That didn't make the number look any less ridiculous.

"The specialist tier," I said.

Pin-Lee looked at me. "No."

"It's a reasonable rate."

"It's not your rate. You do expert work."

"I don't need the expert rate."

"That's not the issue and you know it."

I did know. I said it anyway. "General technical, then. I don't care. Any of them."

That was the moment I could feel the whole thing tipping. If I took a lower rate, I'd be taking payment, technically, and everyone could stop arguing. And underneath it I'd still have the same idea about myself I'd walked in with, just with a number attached. I knew that, and I still wanted to do it. It would have been so much easier.

Mensah, who hadn't said anything since she sat down, said, "SecUnit."

I looked at her. Not her face. Her shoulder.

"If Three came to you tomorrow," she said, "and asked you what rate it should accept for this kind of work, what would you tell it?"

I didn't answer.

She didn't say anything else. She just waited. She's better at waiting than anyone I know, including ART, who is a ship and has nothing better to do.

What would I tell Three?

I would tell it the expert rate. Obviously. It had found the environmental log problem in twenty minutes. I'd have told it to take every bit of what that was worth, and not to let anyone talk it down, and that if anybody tried, it should send them to Pin-Lee. I would have told it that its time was its own and nobody got to have it for free. Not even nice people.

I said, "Expert."

Pin-Lee put it in the document. She didn't make a face. I think it cost her something.

Gurathin said, "Now. That wasn't so hard."

"Yes, it was," I said.

He looked at me for a second. Then he nodded, once, and didn't say anything else, which is the nicest thing Gurathin has ever done for me.

Then the door opened.

I hadn't invited anyone else and I hadn't been watching the cameras, so I knew before I looked up that this was going to be bad, and then I saw it was Senior Officer Indah and knew it was going to be worse.

Indah had clearly come straight from the docks. She was still wearing her inspection gear. She looked at all of us, then at the display, then at me.

"Tamas pinged me on the feed. He said there was a meeting about consultant rates," she said. "He also told me some things I didn't know." She came over and stood at the end of the table. "SecUnit, how many requests have you done for my department recently?"

I thought about not answering. Indah has a way of making that seem like a bad idea. "Fourteen. Plus the volunteer category ones."

"And you weren't paid for any of them."

"I chose not to be."

Indah looked at Tamas. Tamas looked like he wanted to sink under the table.

"Okay," Indah said. "I'm going to say this once, and then I'm going to go back to the docks, because I have four more freighters to inspect before the end of shift. This department pays consultants. We pay them because they're doing work we need, and we pay them because if we don't, we start thinking of expertise as something that just shows up when we want it, and that's how you get sloppy. I didn't know this was happening. I should have. That's on me."

She turned back to me. "Every one of those requests is getting paid. Retroactively. At the rate you just agreed to."

"No," I said.

"I wasn't asking."

"I made those decisions at the time. You can't decide after the fact that I wasn't allowed to make them."

"Maybe not. But I can decide about my own department's accounting. You performed work. We received value. We pay for value. That's it."

I looked at Pin-Lee for help. Pin-Lee was looking at Indah with an expression of open admiration.

"Also," Indah added, "the Ilse Varro case."

My performance reliability dropped a few points when she said that. I'd been hoping Indah didn't know.

"Tamas sent you that information. That counts as a request, as far as I'm concerned." She looked at Tamas. "Doesn't it?"

Tamas, who had very clearly not meant it as a request at the time, lied. "Yes. Absolutely. It was a request."

Indah aimed a stern look at me. "Then you were on a Station Security case when you went into that freighter's feed," she said. "Which means the complaint is a complaint about an authorized consultant doing their job." She glanced at Pin-Lee. "I assume that's useful."

Pin-Lee said, "Extremely."

I opened my mouth to argue. Then I closed it, because I had just understood that if I argued, I'd be arguing to keep the complaint in my record. The complaint the Council would read. The one that said a construct with no standing had broken into a ship's systems.

Indah had backed me into a corner, but it was a corner I needed to be in.

"Fine," I said.

"Good." Indah nodded to everyone. "Tamas, come see me after your shift. We're going to talk about the proper way to handle the work request queue." Tamas made a small, unhappy sound. Then Indah left.

There was a pause.

"I really like her," Pin-Lee said.

"I know," I said. "That's a problem."

The payments came through that afternoon. All fifteen of them, plus my volunteer-category requests from the last week. (Indah had put Three's through too. Tamas told me. He also told me he'd be more careful about which ones he sent to me and Three, since we weren't free anymore.) A line of deposits stacked up in my account, each with the same label:

I looked at them for a long time. Long enough that the show I'd started got through an entire scene without me.

The first thing I wanted to do was give it all away. Not because I needed to, but because the money was there and I didn't want it to be there. There was a refugee support fund for new arrivals. I could put all of it in and forget about it, and then it would be like it had never happened.

I had the transfer ready. Then I stopped, because I'd figured out what I was doing. (I blamed Bharadwaj.) If I gave the money away the second it arrived, that wasn't generosity. It was me pretending I hadn't changed. That I was still a construct that owned nothing and meant nothing to anyone unless they could profit from me. That wasn't true anymore. And for reasons I still don't understand, that was deeply terrifying.

I closed the transfer. The money stayed.

That evening there was a request in my feed.

Somebody had already looked at it. They'd decided it needed me, and they'd had to see the number before they sent it.

I read the summary. Two access events, same credential, eleven seconds apart, in locations that were four hundred meters apart. Somebody was cloning credentials, or the access system had a timing fault, or something stranger was happening.

I wanted to know which.

I selected ACCEPT. Then I added a note: Send raw logs. Don't pre-filter. Tamas sent back Sending now! with an exclamation point. This time I didn't mind it.

It was a timing fault, it turned out. Boring. It took me forty minutes. The payment arrived before I'd finished writing it up.

Three sent me a message the next cycle.

Station Security sent me a request about a lost access card, it said. The rate was on it. I said no.

I looked at that for longer than I needed to.

Good, I sent back.

Then they sent one about a pressure-seal sensor that keeps giving false alarms. The rate was a lot higher. I said yes.

Also good.

A pause. Then: I'm watching something. It has a lot of ships in it. They keep sinking.

That one has a continuity error in episode six, I said. A ship sinks twice.

I saw, Three said. I thought maybe it was on purpose.

It isn't.

Oh, it said. Then, after a moment: I'm going to keep watching anyway. The maritime detail is interesting.

Okay, I said.

I had money now, and I had avoided giving it away on reflex. Which meant I had to figure out what to do with it.

I'd always had some, technically. There were the hard currency cards from Wilken and Gerth's go-bag, which I had taken after Milu. (I hadn't known what was in the bag when I took it, but I didn't feel bad about it. Wilken and Gerth had tried to get me killed and they'd also murdered some human security consultants, so.) I also had the cards Pin-Lee had quietly added to my bag after TranRollinHyfa, which we had agreed never to discuss.

Then I had some cards from the survey contract, and the ones Mensah had paid me for security after we got back, when I thought she was mostly humoring me. I'd been paid by Indah for the murder investigation here on the station. And there was still a balance on the card Rami had handed me on RaviHyral, when I was Eden, which I had never gotten around to spending.

I'd thought of it as emergency supplies, the same as spare drones and ammunition. The cards were there for when something went wrong.

The Station Security deposits were different. I didn't know what to do with them, so I did what I usually do with something I don't understand. I didn't look at it for a whole cycle, and I watched media instead.

Then Pin-Lee asked me to confirm some details for her brief.

She wanted me to review my contract transfer, the one where Mensah bought me from the company at Port FreeCommerce, to check whether the company had put in any lies. I'd never read that document. I'd been busy getting my body put back together in a cubicle while it happened, and afterward I hadn't wanted to know the details. But Pin-Lee needed me to check the facts, and the facts were in the document, so I opened it.

The dates were at the top of the document, followed by my specifications and service history. I could have stopped there.

The purchase price was in the third section.

I looked at it. I checked it against the attached invoice. I checked it against the final authorization. All the same number.

Then I pulled the company's own published rental rates for a SecUnit on a standard planetary survey contract, which I knew from experience were obscene. Then I found some secondary-market valuations for used SecUnits, which I am not going to explain how I found. I compared them.

I sat in my chair for forty-one seconds without doing anything, which is a long time for me.

Then I sent Pin-Lee a message.

What the fuck.

She replied almost immediately. Good morning to you too.

I sent her the number. THIS.

There was a pause. Then: Ah.

I hate it when humans make that sound. Even when they say it in the feed. It means they know exactly what you're upset about, and they think it's funny, and they're going to make you ask anyway.

Explain, I sent.

Short version or polite version?

Short.

Depreciation.

I stood up. There was no reason to stand up. I did it anyway.

Pin-Lee was at her desk when I came in. She looked up. She looked delighted, which I took as a declaration of hostilities.

"Depreciation," I said.

"You asked for the short version."

"I was fully functional."

"You were functional," she agreed. "I wouldn't go as far as 'fully.' You'd been shot a great deal and went over a cliff, if I remember correctly."

"I was being repaired."

"Exactly. You were a repaired unit. That's a depreciation category."

I didn't have an answer to that. I said, "The company charges more for a single survey contract than that."

"I know." Pin-Lee leaned back. "Do you actually want to know how it happened, or do you just want to be angry?"

I thought about it. "Both."

"Fair." She opened the negotiation file on her display, the one I hadn't known existed, and swung it around so I could see. "The company opened at a number that was frankly insane. They priced you like a new combat-capable unit fresh out of manufacture, with all the standard warranties."

"Good."

"I told them they were delusional."

"Less good."

"Then I went through your service record with them. Line by line." She was smiling now, and making no effort to hide it. "You had a lot of service hours. You had multiple major repairs on record, including a reconstruction. Several of your component classes are no longer in production, which makes replacement parts expensive."

"They still work."

"Not the point. You also had—" she checked the file— "a documented history of 'anomalous behavior' during a contract, filed by the company's own survey support staff. Very useful. And you were associated with Ganaka Pit."

I stopped. "You used Ganaka Pit."

"I didn't mention it out loud." Pin-Lee folded her hands. "I didn't have to. I just asked, very politely, whether they'd prefer to keep a unit with that incident in its records on the open rental market, where anyone might start asking questions about its deployment history, or whether they'd rather close the file and never think about it again. And I mentioned that Mensah had a great many questions about what happened on that contract, and that she was not the kind of person who stops asking."

That was actually a good strategy. It was a very good strategy. I hated how much I appreciated it.

"So you told them I was a liability," I said.

"I told them you were a used, heavily repaired, politically inconvenient asset with uncertain resale value and a real chance of attracting legal attention." She ticked them off on her fingers. "I got the number down three times."

"Three times."

"The third time was the best. I brought in a depreciation table for obsolete component classes."

"I'm not obsolete."

"Your component classes are."

"That's the same thing."

"It is to the company," Pin-Lee said. "Which is why it worked."

I looked at the number on her display. I looked at it for a long time.

"I was worth more than that," I said.

Pin-Lee stared at me. Then she put both hands over her face and made a noise I had never heard her make before. It took me a second to realize she was laughing. She was laughing so hard that she had to put her head down on the desk.

I waited. I had nothing else to do. I had been priced as a used appliance and the person responsible was laughing at me.

Eventually she sat up and wiped her eyes. "You are offended," she said, "that you were priced too low. As property."

"Yes."

"You object to being treated as property."

"Yes."

"And you also object to being undervalued. When you were property."

"Yes."

"Do you see the problem?"

"I see it," I said. "I'm still offended."

She almost started again. She got control of herself, mostly. Then she offered me a wicked smile. "Does it help if I say I enjoyed cheating them blind?"

"Some."

Then Pin-Lee's face changed, and she said, more quietly, "The number never had anything to do with what you're worth. You know that. It was what I could make them accept. It was about their accounting, and their fear of lawsuits, and how badly they wanted to stop having to think about you. That's all."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"Yes." I did. It didn't make the number less annoying.

I stood there for a while. Then I said the thing I'd actually come to say, the thing that had been building since I first saw the third section.

"I want to pay it back."

Pin-Lee stopped smiling.

"No," she said.

"That isn't your decision."

"It is if you want me to structure the transfer."

"I can transfer money myself."

"To Mensah?"

"Yes."

"She'll hate it."

"That's her problem."

Pin-Lee leaned forward. "You don't owe her. That wasn't a loan. She didn't buy you, not in any way that matters. Company records are company records, they don't make anything true."

"I know."

"Then why?"

I had thought about this, which meant I knew the answer and didn't want to say it to Pin-Lee, because she'd write it down somewhere.

Unfortunately, she's good at waiting too. Everyone I know is good at waiting. It's a conspiracy.

"Because the company was paid for me," I said. "That happened. It doesn't matter that they were wrong to want it, it still happened. Mensah paid them. Every time I think about my life then, the story ends with somebody paying for me."

I looked at Pin-Lee's display screen, not at her. "I want to end it. I want the last money that was ever paid for me, to be money I earned myself."

Pin-Lee didn't say anything for a while.

"You need to talk to Mensah," she said finally.

"I came here so I wouldn't have to."

"That was optimistic," she said.

I waited until that evening. Then I sent Mensah a message asking if she had time to see me. She did. She was still on the station for the Council session, so I went down to the hotel's upper lounge, the one with the viewport, where we'd talked before.

She was sitting by the window. She didn't have any work open, which meant Pin-Lee had said something. Possibly what I was coming about. Pin-Lee would argue that she's my attorney and not Mensah's, and that this means something, but I've never seen any evidence of it.

"Pin-Lee told me you saw the transfer records," Mensah said.

"Yes."

"And that you were upset about the price."

"You got an embarrassingly good deal."

Mensah blinked. That was clearly not what she'd expected me to say. Then I watched her understand, and then I watched her try not to laugh, and fail.

"This is serious," I said.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You're not."

"No," she admitted. "Not entirely." She pressed her lips together until she had it under control. "For what it's worth, I thought the number was appalling."

"Too low?"

"The principle."

I let that one go. I sat down across from her. I hadn't decided to. It just seemed like this was going to take a while.

"I want to pay you back," I said.

Her face changed. Whatever was left of the laughter went out of it.

"SecUnit. You don't owe me anything."

"I know."

"It wasn't a loan. It wasn't a purchase. Not to me."

"I know," I said. "I'm not saying you bought me. I'm saying the company sold me. That's different. You didn't make it a transaction. They did. And I can't make them not have done it." I made myself keep going. "I'm glad you paid them. I want you to know that. I'm glad you did it."

Mensah's face did something. I had to look at the viewport. But I still watched her face through the lounge's camera.

"I want to be the one who paid," I said. "In the end. So it's over. For me."

She was quiet for a long time. A shuttle came out of the ring and turned toward the planet, and another one went in its slot. I watched both of them.

"You want to buy yourself," she said at last.

"Yes."

"You already own yourself."

"I know."

"In every way that matters."

"I want the accounting to say it too."

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she looked tired, and sad, and something else I didn't have a word for.

"This is very hard for me," she said.

"I know."

"I don't want your money. I don't want you spending years thinking you owe a debt to me," she said.

"This isn't like that."

"It feels like it."

"Because that's your emotional response."

Mensah's mouth opened. Then it closed.

"A few cycles ago," I said, "everyone spent a lot of time telling me that my feelings about the company weren't the same as being paid when I work. That my work belongs to me, and the money from it belongs to me."

I turned my head to look at her, but the best I could do was her right shoulder. "All of you said that. You said it too. And you can't tell me all that and then say I can't spend my money on the thing that makes you uncomfortable."

There was a long silence.

"That," Mensah said, "is extremely unfair."

"Yes."

"And correct."

"Yes."

"I hate it."

"So do I," I said, and that seemed to help both of us, a little.

She sat back. "If I agree," she said, "I have conditions."

I hadn't expected that. "Okay."

"No interest."

"Obviously."

"No schedule. You can stop at any time, permanently, and nobody ever brings it up again."

"Fine."

"Nothing in writing anywhere that calls the original transfer a loan."

"Pin-Lee will want that anyway."

"No adjustment for inflation."

I hesitated. I had, briefly, thought about it.

Mensah saw the hesitation. "SecUnit."

"Fine. No inflation."

"And no adjustment," she said, "for what you think a newer unit would have cost."

I stared at her.

"I know you," Mensah said. "You were going to recalculate it at your real market value. Undepreciated. With your experience factored in."

I had already started the calculation. I stopped it.

"That's not funny," I said.

"It's a little funny."

"I was undervalued."

"I agree," she said. "Completely. You're still paying the actual number or nothing."

I thought about arguing. I looked at her face, briefly, with my own eyes. And decided not to argue.

"Fine," I said. "The actual number."

"And when you get there," she said, "it's done. No extra. No symbolic last payment. No gift on top to make up for anything."

"Why would I—"

"Because you do things like that."

I didn't. Probably.

"Fine."

Mensah nodded slowly. She looked like someone who'd just agreed to something she was going to think about for a long time.

It wouldn't be as long as she thought.

I'd added it up the night before. Between all the hard currency cards and the work for Station Security, I had more than the amount from section three of the transfer document. Pin-Lee had chiseled the company down so far that a construct with a handful of stolen cards and a few months of consulting could buy itself. I found this almost as offensive as the original number.

I made the mistake of telling Pin-Lee, and she insisted I keep back enough for independent transit and what she called "unforeseen circumstances," which to be fair is always a possibility for me. So I needed a few more jobs.

The next cycle, Station Security sent me something about tampered environmental telemetry in a commercial habitation block. Somebody had altered the air-quality reporting so that an unregistered fabrication process wouldn't trigger an inspection.

My first thought, when I read the request, was that it would get me most of the way to my goal.

I didn't like that. It felt like the company. Then I read the summary again and the second thought was that the telemetry pattern was really strange, and I wanted to know why. I'm pretty sure that was why I clicked ACCEPT.

The fabrication process turned out to be leaking a solvent into a shared ventilation duct. Not enough to hurt anybody yet. It would have, in a few months. Station Security shut it down, and the tenant got fined, and three hundred people who would never know about it didn't get sick.

The next cycle, Emergency Coordination messaged about a cargo-lift failure on the freight dock with two handlers trapped under a collapsed load frame. That one I didn't read the rate on at all. I just went. Both handlers were fine. One of them cried and tried to hug me, and I let her hold onto my arm, because she was in shock and it seemed like the fastest way to get her onto the stretcher.

The payment came through the next morning. I messaged Pin-Lee that I wasn't going to accept pay for rescue work and I didn't want to argue about it, I just wanted her to fix it. She said okay, but it was too late this time. Fine.

I checked the reserve. I checked the number on section three, even though I doubt even a memory purge could make me not know it. I had enough.

I scheduled the transfer. Then I canceled it. Then I scheduled it again and stared at it for three whole minutes.

Then I sent it.

Transfer complete.

That was all. No alert went off. My legal status didn't change. The company still existed. Ganaka Pit had still happened. I sat in my chair and Sanctuary Moon still played on my display and nothing at all was different, except that now no one owned me, except me.

I pinged Mensah. Done.

She replied almost immediately. I know. I got it.

Then: I still hate it.

I know, I sent.

A pause. Then: Do you feel different?

I thought about lying. I didn't.

Yes.

Another pause, longer.

I'm glad.

I closed the feed. I opened it again. The message was still there. Humans.

Pin-Lee sent me a message an hour later:

Congratulations on your purchase of one used, heavily depreciated SecUnit with obsolete component classes. I hope it gives you many years of reliable service.

I told her I was going to hack her office environmental controls and set the temperature to whatever is least comfortable for humans. She said the station's safety protocols wouldn't let me. I said I knew how to get around the station's safety protocols. She said she knew I knew, and that she'd drafted the safety protocols, and that she was looking forward to finding out which of us was better at it.

I didn't hack her environmental controls. It's possible I ran a few simulations.

Ratthi found out that evening, because he and Pin-Lee went out for intoxicants and he's the one person who can get her to forget she's a lawyer. He showed up at my door later than most people would have been awake.

"I won't hug you," he said.

"I appreciate that."

"I just wanted to say, I heard, and I think it's wonderful, and I won't say anything else about it."

I didn't say anything. He lasted two seconds.

"Pin-Lee really got you that cheap?"

I closed the door. He was laughing on the other side of it. I could hear him on the corridor camera all the way to the lift.

Afterward, my account was almost empty. Only the reserve was left. I tried not to care. I really didn't care, except—

Since I left the company, I hadn't had armor.

The company's armor had been cheap, the way all SecUnit armor is: unpowered plates over the organic parts to protect their investment. I'd missed the helmet a lot at first, because it hid my face, but I was getting over that. (Okay. That's a lie. I missed my helmet all the time.) Still, when someone shot me in a place that armor would have stopped, I thought about getting some. I just hadn't wanted to bother Mensah, because she'd already bought me two boxes of drones. Now I had a way to get it myself.

What I wanted wasn't company armor. I wanted good armor. And, I wanted armor whose ownership record had never had anyone's name on it but mine.

It was going to cost a lot. Much more than I had. Much more, I noticed, than I'd cost.

I decided not to think about that.

I opened the request queue. There was one waiting.

I read the summary. It was interesting.

I clicked ACCEPT.