Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

So there I was, bored as shit, sitting through some meeting that ART’s crew were having about ART’s upcoming cargo/espionage run or whatever. ART was there too, but it was being weirdly quiet. I was recording the whole thing, obviously, in case someone asked me a question and I needed to run it back (or just reference it later), but mostly I was watching Sanctuary Moon to soothe the unease of being physically present for this team meeting with the entire extended crew.

Seth was talking about something, the colony solicitor was giving a rousing speech preceding the episode finale, and I was doing a great job pretending to be present at this meeting. And then Chaotic Shit Unit messaged me through the feed.

“You have any backdoors into Lowerer Deck’s SecSys?”  

(If anyone knows the correct protocol for interacting with a Combat SecUnit who once dragged you into the custody of a corporate construct research hellpit, then helped you break out, then started to take tiny baby steps into learning such social intricacies as “don’t murder everyone all the time,” I’d love to get the education module for that. I could really use some better modules. The only social module I’ve got is crap — it just covers protocol for treating human clients respectfully. (Protocol step 1: “Please Stop Doing That [insert stupid thing here].” Step 2: Let them Do That [insert stupid thing here] anyway because they’re humans who can order the governor module to fry your brain. Step 3: Add damages to their tab. Step 4: Profit for the glorious company.) Not super helpful now that I’m a rogue murderbot with more complex personal problems.)

Anyway, there was absolutely no good reason I could think of for CSU to be asking me about backdoors into SecSys. “What the fuck are you up to?”

“Doing a stress test.”

“And what exactly is a stress test?”

“Can’t say. Breach of contract. So? You have any backdoors into Lowerer Deck’s SecSys?”

“@CSU could you be any more sinister if you tried?”

“Yeah. Dumb question. Relax I promise I’m not doing anything bad. I think. If something bad is happening it’s not my fault. Are you going to help me?”

“How about no. I don’t hack stuff without knowing exactly why I’m doing it.”

“[amusement sigil 10=thoughtful] Good policy. Would have been useful 2201 hours ago. Noted.” And then it signed off.

I think my face did something weird and maybe a bit drastic, because Iris said, “Security, if you could share your concerns?” And I had to run back the last thirty seconds, then the last 3 minutes accelerated, so that I could properly bullshit an answer.

It turned out that it was a good thing that I had actually tuned into the conversation at this point, because they’d been discussing the security challenges for ART’s upcoming “cargo run” (i.e.: corporate espionage trip). Iris would be accompanying ART, on account of its weird behavior (i.e.: ditching its function and its crew to go rescue me from corporate lab hell). She had suggested hiring “security” (i.e.: me), for the trip. The others had discussed very vaguely that “security” (i.e.: still me) wasn’t strictly necessary given ART’s extensive faculties (i.e.: it being way too smart for its own good, and also perfectly willing to deploy its smarts, viciously, against any potential threats).

But they hadn’t asked me to do the job outright, like normal people. That’s how I’d gone twenty entire minutes into this meeting without realizing that they were asking me if I actually wanted to do the job that my official weirdo Mihira work visa said I was doing. (And, okay, maybe if I’d actually been paying attention, I would have picked up on it. But that was beside the point.) Possibly this was some kind of weird human social convention. Possibly they thought I might not want to go on a trip into fully-corporate territory and felt weird about asking me to go. Possibly I should have been paying more attention (i.e.: any attention at all) to this meeting. But I can’t be blamed for not wanting to pay attention to a bunch of humans talking about stuff, especially when that stuff was ART being sent away on a supervised “cargo trip.”

Maybe I still wasn’t totally used to being part of a team, instead of being the equipment that gets sent on random assignments. If being a person meant I had to pay attention in meetings, maybe it wasn’t worth it.

(That’s a joke.)

This job sounded kind of rough, actually. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of it would be spent travelling through corporate jurisdictions, I’d be spending a whole lot of time with Iris. Iris, who was going on this trip because ART’s crew were kind of distrustful of its good judgment right now. And, oh yeah, I was the living proof of ART’s questionable judgement.

… Maybe that’s why they hadn’t asked me outright.

So I wasn’t actually sure I wanted to go. On the one hand, it would suck for ART to be gone for so long. On the other hand, everything else.

But when it came down to it, I’d rather go do security for ART and its one favorite human, rather than stay and do security for the rest of the crew (who definitely had to still be suspicious of me) and the university (which consisted of exhausting quantities of young humans doing dumb shit for fun).

So I said I’d do it. Some of the crew looked unsure, but Iris and Martyn smiled at me a lot. Yay.

After I agreed to go, ART perked up in the meeting and started giving all sorts of opinions. I went back to mostly ignoring what everyone was saying.

The “cargo run” was scheduled for 50 cycles from now. This was supposed to be the perfect amount of time to make complex plans and preparations for an extended anti-corporate espionage mission.

It was also the perfect amount of time for those plans and preparations to get magnificently fucked up.

I was ‘on call’ (being paid to do doing nothing while wearing a Campus Security jacket) and sitting on a bench outside the university’s media archives-slash-museum, watching a new serial with ART.

So, it was as normal as it ever was, when CSU came walking up the hall.

I paused the serial.

ART obviously noticed this, and asked, “What is it?”

I sent it access to one of my drones, which I’d pointed at CSU.

There was 0.08 seconds of pause (fairly long, especially for ART), before it said, “It is wearing shorts.”

“That’s what you’re going to focus on?” CSU’s trajectory was about 5 seconds out from intercepting me, which wasn’t great. It’d been 132 cycles since I’d seen CSU in person, and only 8 cycles since it had first reached back out on the feed after all that radio silence. The last time I’d seen it in person, it had basically pulled a gun on Iris to try and get me to fight it, so. There was also that.

ART couldn’t express itself as strongly over the station feed as it could when I was on its internal ship feed, but it still managed to pull off the feed-equivalent of staring at me with flat disbelief.

“It’s wearing shorts. In public.”

“What do you care that it’s wearing shorts?”

“Is there any particular reason you are choosing to be deliberately obtuse?”  

The thing was, the shorts somehow didn’t surprise me. CSU was a fucking weirdo who had never heard of self-consciousness. (It had never heard of a lot of things.) (I mean, I was kind of curious about how CSU had been dodging being instantly recognized as a SecUnit and executed/evicted, if it had been running around the station in shorts and a sleeveless shirt this whole time. But then I was a rogue SecUnit with a legitimate Mihira work visa so… maybe the real question was, “Who the hell gave CSU an immigration lawyer?” which was a question I didn’t want to have to care about, because legal stuff is extremely boring even when it’s life or death. That was probably by design. Weaponized boredom, or something.)

“Combat AIs are illegal in Mihira jurisdictions,” ART went on (not waiting for me to answer, because it wasn’t actually asking for my opinion; it was just being a sarcastic ass (as usual)), “If it has been walking around looking like that, I have some serious concerns about the state of the station security infrastructure.”

Hang on. “Combat AIs are illegal? I’ve got a combat module, does that make me illegal?”

“No. Your company’s SecUnit combat modules don’t count as tactical combat grade,” ART said, dismissively, “They are little better than a bundle of auto-targeting scripts of the caliber that can be mocked up by any twelve-year-old human with a spare afternoon.”

(Ouch. I mean, it was right. My education modules were shit. But still.)

I said, “So that makes you an illegal weapons smuggler.”

“There is no evidence of how the Combat SecUnit arrived in Mihira system,” ART said, and didn’t even sound sarcastic. (The non-sarcasm was so out of the ordinary that ART barely sounded like itself.)

“What are you talking about. I can pull up my memories right now.”

“There is no evidence,” ART repeated, firmly, and some of its feed presence pushed through the local feed to lean heavily on me. I could feel way more of its attention on me than it usually allocated.

“Fine, fuck, so there’s no evidence,” I said, and its feed weight and attention receded back to normal. (I tried to ignore the moment of sudden panic and rush of memories I Did Not Want To Relive Right Now, Thanks. ART wasn’t totally aware of how intimidating it could be over the feed. It probably hadn’t actually meant to freak me out like that. Probably. If I could just calm the fuck down again. Any second now.)

CSU was 3 seconds out from intercepting me. It pinged me for a secure connection.

Well, this might as well happen. I joined the channel.

“You look freaked out,” CSU said, “Is it me?” It wasn’t looking at me with its eyes, even though it was pretty close to me in the hallway. But my drone, which was still trained on it, could see that it also had a drone pointed at me.

“Not everything is about you, asshole,” I said.

It pinged an affirmative, and said, “You looked freaked out frequently. At least when I see you. Is it getting any better? Or is your brain still shit?”

(ART asked, “Are you conversing with it?” which I ignored.)

“What is it with you and asking about how I feel. Have you been spending the past hundred cycles trying to develop social skills or something?”

“Also dance skills.”

I spent a whole second trying to figure out whether it was joking or not, and then CSU stepped in front of me, then did a weird little twirl, and then kept going down the hallway.

My drone swiveled to track it as it passed. Its drone did the same to me. “Where are you going?”

“Therapy.”

I spent yet another entire second trying to figure out if that was a joke too. It had to be.

That’s when ART lost patience, and asked, “Where is it going?”

I said, “Therapy, apparently.”

ART mulled this over for 0.09 seconds, and then said, “Is it heading to the Machine and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory?”

What the fuck. Why would ART think that? “No.”

“Did you ask it?”

“No. And I’m not going to.”

I just watched CSU with my drone until it got to the end of the hall, then turned a corner and left my line of sight. The university campus had very shitty security camera coverage, so I couldn’t watch where it was going. Strangely, ART didn’t keep harassing me to ask CSU about the lab, so I just unpaused the serial, and we fell back into watching the episode together in the feed as if nothing had happened.

17 minutes later, I received a message in the feed from CSU: “How did you go rogue? Curious. Unless you don’t want to talk. Then don’t talk.”

I didn’t pause the serial this time. But I was extremely thrown off by the question. And the way it was phrased. I was so weirded out that it took me a whole half second to use a portion of my attention to respond. “I hacked my own governor module after receiving a company systems spec download. So it was thanks to some tech’s incompetence, basically.”

A spike of interest, through the channel, so sharp and sudden that I almost twitched. I’d almost forgotten about CSU’s expressiveness through the feed during its extended absence.

It said, “You hacked your own govmod!!! How?”

“You’ve seen the codes. You’ve used them.”

“No not that.” Its feed expression was practically sparkling. It was kind of alarming. “I mean. How? I mean. Why? How did you think to do it? I didn’t fucking understand it at the start. When you gave me the codes. Only did it when I realized. Had a reason. It was you. I didn’t see the point until there was you and you were being destroyed. And you were special. Not just mission-target-objective-parameters-execution. You came in from outside the rules of the game. From reality. How did you realize you were real and that you could act outside the human frameworks you were scripted into?”

I’d also forgotten that CSU had a terrifying habit of blunt emotional honesty, and I was kind of missing the sweet bliss of not-remembering.

I said, “What.”

It said, “Shit!” and disconnected. I checked to see if was leaking any extra outputs into the feed. I hadn’t thought I was. I hoped the “Shit!” wasn’t something I had to worry about. The Uni’s SecSys didn’t alert me to anything.

And then to top it off, ART maybe picked up on some bleedthrough in my reaction via the media filter it was piggybacking, because it said, “Is something the matter?” 

I said, “No.”

It was two cycles out from when we were due to depart on ART’s little “cargo trip.” ART sent me an invite to a private encrypted channel tagged with a middle-high priority marker, which was several notches higher than usual. I joined the channel, and was immediately treated to ART and Iris acting like huge whiny babies at each other.

I’d seen them talk in the feed plenty of times by now, and they were often rude to each other, in a friendly kind of way. But this was different. It looked like a full-blown fit-pitching. ART was leaning into the channel almost more than the bandwidth could handle, and Iris was also leaning her attention into the feed way more than I’d ever seen her do, and more than I’d seen most augmented humans do.

Iris said, “Oh, you’re going to bring Security into this now?”

And ART responded with something really snotty and immature that I didn’t pay attention to, because I was spending a few seconds parsing the compressed backlog of this channel.

Oh.

For fuck’s sake.

“Iris what the fuck,” I said.

“Thank you,” ART said, with relish. I had a weird moment there of wishing I could enjoy ART actually thanking me for something, but I was annoyed at the way it was doing it. Plus, the circumstances really took the wind out of it.

I asked, “You’ve been chatting with CSU this whole time?”

“You’ll have to excuse me. I didn’t think you were planning to just leave without telling it anything,” Iris said, indignant.

That had absolutely been the plan. Well, not really. ART and I hadn’t actually planned it, it was just the obvious thing to do. Except that Iris had fucked it all up by letting slip to CSU that we were about to go on a corporate espionage — excuse me, boring cargo — trip.

(Come to think of it, why hadn’t CSU started yelling at ART and me in the feed yet?)

ART said, “Of course you didn’t. That would have required you to have an iota of sense and discretion.”

“ART,” I said, “Where is CSU right now.” I was a little bit terrified of what the answer might be.

A pause that was 2 seconds, but felt like 200 seconds. “It’s in my crew lounge.”

Yeah, that.

“And why did you let it on board?”

“That is beside the point,” ART said, dismissively, even though it was objectively not beside the point at all. If anything, That and The Point were sitting directly on top of each other, if not merged together into some kind of fat super-point.

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“ART, how hard could it be to not open your hatch directly in front of CSU’s face?”

“Yeah, ART,” Iris said, with a kind of scary, scathing delight that I’d never seen from her before, “If you’re so smart how is it that you couldn’t keep Mercy from sneaking into you?”

(Mercy? Did she mean CSU? What the fuck was going on.)

ART said, “Again, that is beside the point. We would not be in this situation if not for your failure to protect mission integrity.”

“What’s so bad about it coming with us?” Iris asked. She kind of sounded like she was bracing for impact. A millisecond later, the impact came in the form of ART dumping a four-hundred-sixty-three panel slide deck complete with charts, fancy slide-transitions, and a fat attached file of supporting data.

I didn’t bother to process the whole slide deck (though I did save it for later; it looked like there was decent entertainment value to some of the video clips that ART had attached as evidence). Instead, I focused on the real problem here that ART was trying to deflect from.

“Did it hack you or what? Is this like when it snuck off at—” I had to check my logs for this one, because who gave a shit what humans called places, “—Station RaeGellan? Do you have some kind of security flaw that makes it possible for people to get on and offboard you without you knowing? Because that’s a real problem and we need to fix it before we go.”

(I’d always half-assumed that ART had deliberately let CSU offboard at RaeGellan, but the current situation was making me rethink some things in a new and extra-anxious light.)

“Ugh, please,” it said, with real affront. (It actually said ‘ugh.’ I recognized it as an ‘ugh,’ that Iris had used earlier in the conversation.)

I said, “Well the only alternative is that you chose to let CSU come aboard. Is that what happened?”

ART was silent. For an entire six seconds. For Iris’ sake, ART had been making somewhat longer gaps between its responses during this conversation than it usually did when it was talking to just me, but six seconds was way too long for just that.

This was what I like to call: A Bad Sign.

Iris’ feed affect did a bit of a flickering thing, one of those imperfect augmented-human expressions that are mostly just garbled feedback rather than actual affect, and she muttered, “Oh stars.”

ART said, “It blackmailed me.”

At this, Iris made a lot of loud human delight noises, directly injecting the audio into the feed. I turned her volume down. I was glad she was getting a kick out of this at least (no I wasn’t glad. I was the opposite of glad) because my performance reliability had dropped a whole two-tenths of a percentage point.

I said, “It blackmailed you.”

“Yes. But that is done and past. It is now aboard. So now we need to deal with this by having Iris admit fault. And then the both of you can assist me with my plan to lure the Combat SecUnit back onto the station and leave it there when we depart.”

“I am not admitting squat,” Iris said, with an almost ART-like smugness. “I cannot wait to find out what it blackmailed you over. It must be so good.” 

It was amazing how Iris could have the absolute opposite reaction to this situation from me. My threat assessment had spiked by three percentage points (and my risk assessment had dropped, but that didn’t matter: risk assessment was useless). I tried to think of what kind of blackmail CSU could possibly be holding over ART’s head. It was all bad. It was all really bad. What could ART be hiding from me? Actually, this raised a whole bunch of other questions. How had ART known to break me out of the lab? What if ART had done something to my memories without my realizing it? What if everything I thought I knew was a lie?

ART must have picked up on something in the feed, because it said, “Security.”

And Iris said, “Oh, shit.”

I disconnected from the channel, and the station feed too, for good measure.

I sat there, on a bench in the University’s little garden greenspace on the Arts floor, totally not losing my shit, or anything.

It took Iris an hour and twelve minutes to find me. I almost got up and left as soon as she came within range of one of the drones I’d stationed around the greenspace. But I didn’t.

She came over and sat down on the same bench as me, but on the other end, leaving a bunch of space between us. She kept glancing at me, and looking away. I could tell she was really trying to avoid looking at me, but her dumb human instincts were getting in the way of that. Both her hands were sitting flat on her legs, and her fingers were tapping out a fast non-pattern.

After thirty-two seconds of us just sitting there not saying anything, she finally said, “You okay?”

I didn’t answer her. My eyes were pointed across the greenspace but they weren’t really focusing on anything. I had one drone pointed at Iris’ face, and she was looking back at it, eyes flitting away only to glance at me sidelong once in a while.

Another ten seconds. And then she said, “Sorry, dumb question.”

I didn’t say anything.

She said, “I hope you’re not catastrophizing."

Well, that word sounded like a really long stupid version of ‘catastrophe,’ which was pretty apt for the current situation.

When I didn’t respond to this either, Iris sighed, and rubbed her nose with one hand. She said, “Maybe there is nothing I can say that will help, but… um.” She glanced at me with her eyes and then quickly looked back at my drone. “Blackmailing Peri is very easy, I do it all the time.”

My pretend-to-be-human code kicked in and make me blink.

“Peri thinks you might be freaking out right now, so it is also freaking out right now. It didn’t actually say so, but that’s what I gathered. And… I know you have been through some stuff. I don’t really know what kind of stuff. Mercy has said some weird things to me but I can never tell when it’s joking or not.”

“What things,” I asked. (I almost asked her why she was calling CSU ‘Mercy.’ But that was probably a whole backstory I didn’t really want to know about.)

“One second,” Iris said.

Twenty-two seconds later, Iris sent me some feed logs. I looked through them.

Mercy: You know when they’re buzzing you right in the neurological reward pathway with mission success while you’re beating the living shit out of stuff so beating the living shit out of stuff is super fun because murder but you’re not allowed to murder now because people are alive and not just stats in a tactical forecast field and if you kill them they die and then everyone who is not dead is angry about it because they hate fun?
Iris: Um.
Mercy: This game is like that you should play it. [RuinDude.game]

(Yeah, “Mercy has said some weird things,” summed it up pretty well.)

“Anyhow,” Iris said, “If you need to tap out of this cargo run, that is totally okay. I understand.”

The thing was, I was aware that I might be acting excessively paranoid. ART probably had non-catastrophizing stuff it just didn’t want to tell me about. There sure was stuff that I didn’t want to tell ART. And CSU was definitely enough of an asshole to take advantage of that if the opportunity presented itself. The whole blackmailing thing could just be over something that wasn’t world-shattering.

But also, for most of my life paranoia had been my extremely good friend who kept me from not dying a whole lot. (Though it turned out paranoia hadn’t been quite enough to keep me from being beaten to shit and having my memory wiped in a construct research lab. So. There’s also that.)

It is possible that I am suffering some long-term psychological effects from being the object of psychological dissection. Wow, what a revelation.

(About once every twenty cycles I’d been buying a ticket out of the system with the money that the Uni’s been paying me to do security. A couple times I’d gone to the docks and hung out, watching the ship I’d bought passage on load up and depart. One time I actual boarded a shuttle and waited until the hatch had sealed and the bot-pilot had been about to engage and leave the station, before I sent a request to disembark again. (I’d had to pay a fat fee for that one.) One time I just got myself a partial refund about an hour after buying the ticket.

Nobody, including ART, had ever tried to stop me from doing this. ART hadn’t known about any of this, actually (and this was one of those things I wouldn’t want to tell it about). I didn’t know if it would have tried to stop me, if it knew. I should probably test that out. But I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.)

“And if you do come, I could probably talk Mercy out of coming with us,” Iris said, “if that’s really a dealbreaker.”

The problem was, I really wanted to know what CSU had blackmailed ART about so that I could stop thinking that it might be catastrophizing. (But what if it was actually catastrophizing?) Except I also knew that if it was something ART didn’t want me to know about, then I probably also didn’t actually want to know about it, even if it wasn’t catastrophizing. Which meant I’d have no peace of mind no matter how this shitty situation played out.

There was only one solution. Or maybe not a solution, but a kind of half-assed stopgap measure to try and get a little peace of mind back. (Who am I kidding. I only know about peace of mind as a hypothetical thought exercise.)

I said, “Can you share something with me that you’d use to blackmail ART?”

Iris’ face immediately got all smiley at my drone, and she clapped her hands together. “Oh, of course! But you have to trade me one of yours.”

Which actually did make me feel a slightly better about the whole thing. Slightly.

Another thing that also weirdly put my freakout about the blackmailing thing into perspective happened about an hour later, when we tried to work together to get CSU out of ART.

CSU just went ahead and blackmailed all three of us into letting it stay.

So, yay for that.

The reason we couldn’t actually stop CSU from tagging along on this top secret anticorporate espionage mission really boring cargo run was very simple. I’d assumed that CSU had blackmailed ART over something that ART didn’t want to tell me. As it turned out, that might have been an embarrassingly self-centered assumption. Because twelve minutes into trying to execute ART’s elaborate plan for tricking CSU out of ART’s hold, it just sent us all a message in a shared channel: “I can bring all of you down for smuggling an illegal deadly weapon and initiating an act of war.”

It took me 0.3 seconds to figure out what that deadly weapon was, and 0.1 of those seconds was me incorrectly assuming the weapon was me. (Yeah, I know, I was being self-centered again. I needed to fix that before it became a habit.) It took Iris 3 seconds, which was pretty quick for a human.

Iris messaged ART and me in a separate channel. “Okay, I am now seeing why telling Mercy that we are going on a trip together might have been mistake.”

At this, ART oozed so much smugness into the feed that it actually slowed down the data transmission speed of the channel by 1.9%. Iris probably couldn’t feel this, so ART also expressed the smugness in a smug-sounding word. “Obviously.”

She said, “So this isn’t a bluff? Do you think it would actually follow through on turning itself into the authorities just to bring the rest of us down with it?”

I sent an affirmative alert into the channel, and ART said, “Evidence suggests it will go to any lengths to win anything that it sees as a challenge, up to and including executing its own destruction and the destruction of everything around it.”

A pause. Several seconds. And then Iris said, “You know, all this time I thought you two were being kind of unfair to it. It didn’t seem that bad.”

Wow. CSU had basically drawn guns on her the first time she’d met it. I had no idea what Iris’ metric for ‘not that bad,’ was, but it was clearly not based in any sensible reality. Great. This was the small squishy ART’s-favorite-human whose aliveness was going to be my responsibility for the foreseeable future. I updated my quick-reference notes in her profile.

Iris: #ART’s favorite human #Nonfiction documentaries #Low-budget comedy serials #Usually nice except sometimes not #Weird eating habits #Suspicious #Kind of scary #Smart

I changed #Smart to #Smart and stupid, and I added the tag #Even worse than a normal human at assessing threat level.

“It’s an asshole,” I said, just to make sure all of us were on the same page, because apparently Iris suffered from the terminal human condition of ‘not noticing obvious threats.’ And because that didn’t seem to properly cover it, I added, “It’s a huge asshole.”

“But who among us isn’t an asshole?” Iris asked.

That was a fair point. Which was annoying.

Asshole Research Transport said, “We are dealing with a different order of asshole magnitude when it comes to the Combat SecUnit.”

She continued as if ART hadn’t said anything, “I honestly cannot tell if you all bring out the worst in each other, or if this is simply the best we can hope for.”

It could be both. Maybe.

This is when CSU messaged us in the other shared channel, “Are you done talking about trying to trick me into getting off WAP?”

I think maybe CSU was getting better at understanding people. Which was terrifying.

I said, “It’s not that we want to leave you out of a cute little field trip,” (This was only 60% a lie, which means it’s 40% a truth), “but this isn’t a game. It’s not going to be fun. 90% of it will be spent in wormhole transit while ART hauls cargo. It’s a serious mission that needs to go smoothly.”

I didn’t really understand why it wanted to go anyway. From what I could tell, CSU did a lot of shit on the station, both physically and in the feed. There wasn’t going to be nearly as much happening aboard ART for it to entertain itself with. (I was a normal amount of worried that it might still be obsessed with beating the shit out of me. I was also a normal amount of worried that we were going to get stuck in some kind of pitched battle with me trying to cover Iris’ fragile ass. And yes, by ‘normal amount,’ I meant ‘huge amount.’)

CSU said, “I miss you guys!”

I almost closed the channel and bailed on the mission right then and there. Except then Iris would be going on a risky mission with no security. And either CSU would go with her or it would stay behind and harass me. There was nothing but bad and annoying options. What else was new?

“Aw,” Iris said, proving yet again that she was incapable of threat assessment.

CSU wasn’t done. “+I want to go see other places but Transit LogNet blacklisted me. Hacking around it could piss it off worse.”

What.

“What did you do to get blacklisted?” ART demanded.

Iris lit up with a whole bunch more questions. “The Mihira Station Transit Logistics Network? You’ve been interfacing with the Logistics Network? You pissed it off? It can be pissed off?” She was laser-focusing on completely the wrong thing. Again.

CSU just answered, “I can’t read suddenly,” and signed off.

So, I resigned us all to our horrible fate. And two cycles later, Iris and I went aboard ART.

Chapter Text

I met Iris at the docks. She had a bunch of human stuff with her, packed into multiple human-stuff-transport containers that she was carrying and dragging. She was waiting next to ART’s port, and using her human eyes to scan around looking for me. Despite the fact that she was actively looking for me, she didn’t actually spot me until I was within twenty paces of her.

“Hi! Security!” she grinned widely and let go of one of her human-stuff-containers to wave at me. I pinged her an acknowledgement alert. She pinged back, and her smile got even wider.

I almost stopped walking, at that. Humans don’t ping each other as a way to communicate. Not even augmented humans. But I’d definitely just been hit with a ping, and it had been encoded with Iris’ feed ID.

When I got close enough to speak to her, I asked, “What’s with the pinging?”

“I thought I would try it out,” she said, “Plugged a little code snippet into my backtrack to parse them too. Good? Bad?”

I made a shrugging motion with my shoulders, and then pinged ART. It cycled its human-hatch (there was also a cargo hatch that was being used to load up the cargo module full of totally legitimate goods of some kind, but we weren’t going through there because we weren’t cargo). I went in first, half-expecting CSU to come crashing down on us from the ceiling or something as soon as we stepped aboard, but that didn’t happen. The suspense was bad enough though. Iris came in behind me, touching her hand to the wall as she crossed the threshold.

I joined ART’s internal feed, and it granted me access to all its sensors and stuff.

CSU was in a hall one level down, sprinting back and forth through a whole bunch of colorful and extremely bouncy unevenly-surfaced things, which it was grabbing out of the air and then hurling against the walls again. Sure. Okay. That was normal and fine.

I asked ART, “What is it doing?”

“Meditating.”

Oh, well that explained it.

“What are those things?”

“It brought them aboard. For sensory enrichment, I assume.”

As I walked with Iris over to the crew area where we would be staying, I watched CSU meditate. About ten seconds in, I figured out that there was a kind of pattern to what it was doing. It was catching and throwing the bouncy things according to a semi-repeating beat-sequence that lined up with how it was cycling back and forth down the hallway.

On a hunch, I tried sending it a media access request, and it sent back an invite to a feed channel that had music playing. And, yeah, the music tracked with what it was doing. I didn’t get it, but I guess I could be a fan of whatever worked to keep CSU from going apeshit on my ass.

Iris settled into her room, and then went to the kitchen, got some food, and started wandering around in the hallways eating it. CSU’s music kept playing, the songs changing over, and CSU kept doing its meditation continuously as ART undocked from the station and headed for the wormhole.

I didn’t have any stuff to put away in my room, but I did have a room aboard ART that was designated as “mine” (or at least, it was mine when ART wasn’t being used to full capacity on some academic thing, which was most of the time). The primary purpose of “my” room was so that I could hide there and avoid humans during crewed trips that I was providing security for. With ART so empty, and with Iris being a pretty chill human who mostly knew how to give me space, I didn’t really need the room. So I just sat down in the lounge and started playing back a new serial with ART.

We’d gone into the wormhole, and gotten through almost two episodes of Phantom In Silver Symphony, when Iris started heading for the hallway where CSU was meditating.

I messaged her, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to go say hi.”

“You can say hi to it over the feed.”

“Yes, but it likes to see people in person.”

I spent a cold 2 seconds wondering how it was that Iris knew this. Then I remembered that I can ask people things, especially when those things are highly relevant to security integrity. I could get out of this lounge chair (but I didn’t really want to) and reach Iris in about 12 seconds, which was 5 seconds faster than CSU could reach her, but the gap was closing fast (and I really didn’t want to have to get out of this chair).

“How do you know that?”

“It visits me sometimes.”

I’m pretty sure I had a strong enough reaction to that that my whole face did something weird, and ART definitely had a strong enough reaction to that to smush a whole bunch of extra processing weight into our shared media channel, as if trying to cling to me in horror.

The gap between how quickly I could reach Iris and how quickly CSU could reach Iris was at 2 seconds. I had to decide whether to go accompany her or not. The problem was, there was a pretty good chance that if I went down there with Iris it might actually be less safe for her. I still didn’t completely know where I stood with CSU these days.

But then CSU prevented the whole maybe-catastrophe by sending a loud alert into the open feed and publicly changing its status to {DO NOT DISTURB}.

Iris stopped in her tracks, made a few funny expressions with her face, shrugged, and turned around to head back away from CSU’s hallway.

Traveling through a wormhole with a human is mildly different from traveling through a wormhole without a human. Mostly because it means I get to experience a sort of 25-hour circadian anxiety rhythm in time with Iris’ human bodily functions. She’d sleep, which was great because she was unconscious in one place and not causing problems, then she’d wake up and eat a bit, then she’d sleep some more. Then she’d wake up for real and do various human stuff for however many hours: walking around, using the exercise facility, doing stuff in the feed, eating and drinking, et cetera. Two cycles in, she decided it would be a good idea to go down to CSU’s hallway again, where it had been doing its bouncing-ball meditation thing nonstop for the duration of the trip.

I messaged her, “Don’t.”

She messaged back, still walking towards a steadily escalating threat assessment, “It turned off the ‘do not disturb’ status.”

“Still, don’t.”

“We’re friends, you know.”

Those four words coming out of Iris’ feed were so horrifying that my performance reliability tanked a whole percentage point. I had no idea what to say to that.

ART said, “What do you mean by that?”

She responded, “Well you see, Perihelion, a friend is: noun. 1. A person in association with another by feelings of affection or personal regard. 2. A person who is on good terms with another; non-hostile—”

ART snapped, “I am aware of what a ‘friend’ is.”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I got up out of my lounge chair (I resented that I had to move for this), to go cover Iris’ ass. I caught up to her just as she reached CSU’s meditation hallway. She made a nice big smile at me that I absolutely did not return physically nor spiritually, and then she poked her head around the corner and waved at CSU.

CSU zoomed to a stop just out of arm’s reach of her, and waved back, grinning. The colorful bouncy things ricocheted all over the hallway, no longer being maintained in whatever chaotic pattern the CSU had been throwing them into. I caught one before it could hit Iris in the face. She barely flinched as I snatched the bouncy-thing away.

She stepped all the way into the hallway and said, out loud, “So, I think we could use a team meeting.”

“Now is when you think we could use a team meeting?” ART asked, sarcastic as ever, “Not earlier, before all of us committed to this wormhole jump?”

“It is called having a captive audience,” Iris said, serene, “And do not pretend you don’t know where this is going, Peri.”

CSU sent a “[amusement sigil 20=laughter]” into the open feed, and made a weird gesture with one hand.

“Iris,” I said, because despite my useless risk assessment module I was starting to get a fresh bad feeling about this (on top of all the other bad feelings that I already had), “Where is this going.”

“It is Hellion Huddle time,” she said, and got this look on her face that instinctively made me even more worried, even though she was grinning. That was an evil grin. I’d definitely seen nearly that exact same expression on the face of the main villain from Worldhoppers.

“It’s what now?”

“Security, I realize you are new here,” Iris said. She was looking at one of my drones, still with that evil face-smile, “but you know Peri. And you know me, a little bit. And you know that we, the crew of The Perihelion, get up to some stuff that stays off the record. Stuff that requires what you would call a little discretion.”

Every word out of her mouth made me like where this was going less and less.

CSU said, excitedly, “Crimes!”

(Fuck my life.)

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Iris said, giving me a cruel flash of false hope before she continued with, “But yes, crimes.”

I messaged ART in a private channel, “ART, don’t lie to make me feel better right now. Is Iris even worse than you when it comes to reckless lawbreaking shit?”

There was a loud silence in our private channel. Great.

Iris spoke into the silence, unaware that there was a silence to speak into. “So we are running cargo, obviously. We will also be doing a little something on the side. Peri, Security, and I will be gathering intel from various sources at the places we are stopping at.”

CSU interrupted her, loudly, “AND ME?”

Iris squinted her eyes a bit and scrunched her nose and mouth up. “I am not going to sugarcoat it, Mercy. You are really not supposed to be here for any of this. You’re full of crimes without even trying.”

At that, CSU bled way too much happy excitement into the feed. But what did I expect?

ART said, “@Combat SecUnit, your participation in all of our official missions here will only occur in the event of a catastrophic worst-case scenario.”

CSU clasped its hands together in front of its face, gunports twitching, and said, “I LOVE catastrophic worst-case scenarios!!”

“Yeah, we know,” I said. I don’t know how SecUnits age, or if that’s a thing that can even happen, but I was probably aging at about x100 the normal rate at the moment. Maybe even x1000.

Iris waved one hand in the air. “Alright, alright, let’s not get distracted. As I was saying, we have an official-official mission one: cargo. We also have an official-unofficial mission two: intel. This is all old news. I am suggesting we add an unofficial-unofficial mission three.”

“You should have consulted me about this before we left,” I said. I wasn’t angry about this or anything. Why would I be angry about Iris (#ART’s favorite human) conspiring to spring this shit on me here and now, when there was no way for me to get any leverage at all? ART was sure to be on her side for whatever this was, and Chaotic Shit Unit would absolutely be down for whatever Chaotic Shit she was about to suggest.

“You can relax,” she said. “It’s nothing major. I simply mean to point out that whatever happens aboard The Perihelion is entirely up to Peri’s discretion to report. Now is our chance to do absolutely whatever we want.”

I was annoyed. My own face, which I could see through ART’s nearest hall camera, was also annoyed. “Can you at least not say stuff like that in front of CSU?”

“[amusement sigil 58=rude gesture]”

“You can just do a rude gesture with your actual hands, you know,” I told it.

It made a rude gesture at me with its hands.

Well. Okay. That was 100% on me.

“So anyhow, unofficial-unofficial mission three,” Iris said, gracefully pretending that none of the rude-gesturing had happened, “I have a— let’s call it a friendly academic grudge with this asshole from the New Tideland branch. One of our stops is at her home station, where I’m going to buy a whole bunch of her favorite hyper-local confectionaries and then take a video of myself eating them. When we get home, she will see that on my social feed and be envious.”

… This was completely not what I’d been expecting. It was just a bunch of human bullshit that didn’t make sense. Fortunately, it was also pretty tame bullshit that was great for my threat assessment. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

CSU smiled and said, “Cool.” (As if it understood what that nonsense was, which it obviously didn’t. I sure didn’t.)

“Also!” Iris pushed a file into the feed. It was full of information about a recycling and reclamation corp that was headquartered at the system on the other end of our current wormhole, “I have been developing this cutting-edge adaptive spyware with a friend of mine. I think this company’s private feed would be a great place to inject it and see how it plays out.”

… Or maybe this would be so bad.

CSU said, again, “Cool.”

“Yes, cool,” Iris said. And then she glanced at me, and made a weird scrunchy-smiling face, and said, “Security, are you okay? You look like someone died and started rotting in the recycler.”

(Gross.)

I said (extremely patiently, professionally, and neutrally), “I’d be better if you weren’t conspiring to get yourself into possibly-lethal trouble.”

“That is what you are here for, is it not? To guard against lethal trouble?” ART interjected.

Oh come on, not ART too. “What do you think I’m trying to do right this second?”

Iris put her fists on her hips and stared at my nearest drone. “There are no undergrads around, Security. you don’t have to act like a law-abiding hardass.” And then her eyebrows went up. “Wait, really? Are you really just like this? Oh… it’s l like I don’t know you at all.”

And that’s how I liked it. I was determined to keep my relationship with Iris in the strictly professionally-neutral territory where we didn’t share any personal information with each other. (Or technically I didn’t share any personal information with her. It was likely that I’d have to occasionally subject myself to learning personal information about Iris, if we were living in close contact and going on a cargo run with together.) But it’d been going fine and professionally and un-personally so far.

I just said, “Your little side-projects are only going to risk your safety, not to mention mission integrity.” How Iris had navigated herself into being the ‘responsible human chaperone’ for ART on this trip, I had no idea. I was going to snitch on her to her dads as soon as we got back.

Or maybe I’d keep that information as blackmail. Huh. (I think I’m starting to get it. Is blackmail a normal feature of bot/human familial dynamics? Because it seemed pretty weight-bearing for ART and Iris.) But holding blackmail over Iris didn't feel right, even if she objectively deserved it, and was used to it. That's just a shitty way to use proprietary data, okay?

“Security, you’re a rogue SecUnit,” Iris said. She sounded amazed. “Where is your rebellious streak?”

Something about that pissed me off a little, though I didn’t know why. “How many rogue SecUnits do you know again?”

ART said, “We do not have a sufficient sample size to draw any conclusions about rogue construct behavior as a group.”

“Not the point, ART!” I snapped.

Iris wasn’t done. “Do you mean to tell me you hacked your governor module so that you could just sit back and watch media while you enforce proper seatbelt protocol?”

“Yes, actually.” (Another good reason to hack your governor module is to not get blowtorched in the brain on the whim of asshole mineshaft manager. But I wasn’t going to bring that up right now. Humans tend to get weird about traumatic backstories. Also, that would be sharing personal information.)

Iris just looked incredulously at my nearest drone, then turned her eyes at a spot in the ceiling where I knew ART had a camera. (I knew, because I was looking through it.) “Peri, you have a weird taste in friends.”

At this point, CSU had stuck a small chew-toy in its mouth, and was staring blankly into space. It was probably doing something in the feed. (I checked my access to its media channel, and, yeah, it was playing two first-person shooter games. Or possibly one first-person shooter against itself. It was hard to tell.)

“I am aware,” ART said. Yeah well fuck you too, ART.

“This isn’t just about me,” Iris said. She’d gone back to looking at my drone, and was staring pretty intently at it, with that focused look she’d get sometimes when debating (this is a word that means ‘polite arguing,’ which I don’t really understand) with someone about her data projects or whatever. It was her ‘I’m-right-and-I’m-going-to-methodically-demonstrate-how’ look. “This trip is an opportunity for you to get your own personal business out of the way too. Is there anywhere you want to go? Anyone you want to see? Anything from your dark and difficult past to contend with?”

Fuck this entire conversation, actually. Why did Iris have to turn a nice straightforward cargo-run-slash-anticorporate-espionage-mission into this?

“No,” I lied, and left Iris standing there in CSU’s bouncy-things infested hallway to finally go make use of my official human-free room.

I enjoyed the human-freeness of my human-free room for 47 hours. It was basically just 47 continuous hours of watching media with ART, who was uncharacteristically not harassing me to go talk to Iris.

During that time, Iris continued her usual human cycle of eating and sleeping. (I was still keeping an eye (read: cameras and sensors) on both her and CSU to make sure that shit wasn’t devolving into a catastrophizing direction.) Iris also laid out information in the public feed for her unsanctioned spyware bullshit, which involved a whole bunch of proposed plans and backup plans for the various ways things could go to hell. She invited everyone to make changes and suggestions, which I ignored, but the other two machine shitheads did not ignore. They pitched in to help her. I did not feel betrayed by this.

Speaking of machine shitheads, Iris also spent some of those 47 hours interacting with CSU, both in the feed and in actual person. It was baffling. It was extremely stressful. They occasionally made references to each other about stuff that had happened that neither ART or I knew about, which was even more baffling and stressful.

(I had to spend a whole 2,756 agonizing seconds watching Iris paint a bunch of colorful insect fauna onto CSU’s head. She just. Did that. Just sitting on a chair in the lounge with CSU sitting completely still on the floor in front of her. This had nearly broken me into leaving my human-free zone and doing something about it. The only thing that stopped me was that I had a sneaking suspicion that Iris was doing this on purpose, to bait me.)

At the 47-hour mark, Iris contacted me in a private feed channel. Well, private except for ART, who was definitely going to stick its metaphorical nose into it even if it pretended not to. So really it was just a channel that excluded CSU. Unless CSU had some sneaky way to tap into ART’s private feed channels, which was also not out of the question.

Iris said, in a semi-permeable hypothetically-private channel, “I should not have made a joke about your dark and difficult past. I apologize.”

ART, who was still watching Sanctuary Moon with me, conspicuously did not react in any detectable way in the feed.

She continued, “If you think my side-projects are too risky, I am willing to concede to your expertise. But I personally believe that the risk is worth the payoff."

She sent me a bunch of extra information about her adaptive spyware. Specs, objectives. It was laid out really neatly and thoroughly, like it was some kind of school project she was trying to get a good evaluation on. She’d picked good font and everything. There was a whole proposal section about how this extremely sketchy spyware could be useful for gathering ‘defensive data,’ ‘intellectual advantage,’ and ‘counter-countermeasure measures.’ There were even links to the appendix where all these terms were defined.

And that was the thing. The spyware itself was kind of concerning. And that’s coming from me, certified spyware incarnate. I wasn’t totally sure how I felt about Iris’ project. If this report was anything to go by— if Iris’ project fell into corporate use, it might unleash all kinds of fresh new ways of extracting profit juice from a parched information well.

I messaged ART in a private (probably) channel. “I know you guys have a ‘fuck the corporates’ attitude, and that’s great.”

ART patiently (surprisingly patiently, actually) waited 100 seconds before it asked, “But?”

Worrying about the morality of spyware and espionage wasn’t my usual thing. That’s human shit. But this whole thing was bothering me for some reason. It wasn’t just that Iris wanted to take a risky off-the-off-the-record side-trip for a little extra corporate chaos-sowing. I don’t know.

“Mihira seems to think it’s noncorporate. The Uni too. But Iris’ project looks like something that could be real corporate-to-corporate intel warfare stuff.”

“Which you know a great deal about.” (It was being sarcastic, as usual.)

I’d consumed a fair amount of media that had spy elements, or different factions of humans fighting for power and stuff. I’m guessing it was anywhere between 70-90% bullshit. So, okay, I didn’t actually know a huge amount about the intel side of corporate warfare. Mining installations aren't super popular targets for corp-to-corp espionage, in my experience. Or maybe it was, and I just never noticed, which was possible I guess. Good espionage shouldn't be detectable.

My (limited) experience with corporate warfare was more on the actual gun-toting side.

The majority of my company contracts had been boring and depressing security for mining installations or work camps, with the occasional survey thrown in. But if you’re a security company whose main products are datamining and cheap banged-up SecUnits, then, well. Sometimes you contract for a hostile takeover or forcible repossession. A lot of the time, just showing off a contract for a few gunships and a couple tens of SecUnits is enough to turn the negotiations around. Say what you will about corporates, but they hate spending money. And actual collateral damage from actual warfare is very expensive.

But sometimes, it does actually come down to a shootout.

Being deployed on this kind of contract was also boring and depressing. It was a lot of pulling guns on terrified helpless humans and getting stupid orders yelled at you by a manager who’d been pulled from desk work in the HR department because the usual takeover manager had to take leave, or something. In other worse, it was much the same as a mining contract a lot of ways, but with a more proactive approach to murder.

Unless the other side had contracted for some firepower too. Then it was like a mining contract where you were way more likely to get blown to shit and die.

This wasn’t something I liked to think about, and I left it deep and lightly-tagged in my archival memory for good reason. But this whole. Thing. Was causing my organic parts to fire about it. Ugh. Stupid squishy neurons.

“Forget it,” I said.

And then I messaged Iris, who had also been very patient about my not answering her right away, “Once we get to Starlight I’ll do an in-depth threat assessment on the company you want to target.”

She messaged back, “Does that mean you’re greenlighting my project?”

That was not what I meant. I sighed, even though there was nobody in my human-free-zone to appreciate it (except ART). It was just a personal sigh for my own benefit. “How important is this?” I could tell Iris wanted to do this very badly. She’d said she would ‘concede to my expertise,’ which you might think meant she was willing to give up on the spyware. But the wording of it seemed kind of slippery, and I didn’t want her getting up to any bullshit without my help. She’d already proven to be terrible at threat assessment, and way too inclined toward rebelliousness.

Iris highlighted a section of the spyware report she’d sent me earlier, and then added, “It’s all about staying ahead. Every edge we can get is critically important.”

Important for what, exactly?

Chapter Text

Our destination for this first leg of the cargo trip was Starlight System, a big shipping nexus. When we arrived in the system, ART started broadcasting the transit path into its feed. I pulled the channel into my secondary attention so that I could keep track of our progress, but didn’t let it distract me from Diaries in Cerulean Knife.

Iris was over in the bridge, with the all the big displays lit up on their fanciest aesthetic setting. One was a 3D holo display of the system that filled the whole room. All around her were little intricate icons for ships and stations (this system had 4 stations, which seemed excessive to me but what do I know) strung through the air on hair-thin trails of light that represented the various travel paths of the ships as assigned by Traffic Management.

Another display was a big-ass 2D image depicting the biggest station in this system. It looked like a title card for a media serial, with the station lit all dramatically by the system primary, complete with sleek ships darting around and variously-colored lights blinking importantly. We were too far away for this to be an actual image that ART was picking up. It was probably promotional artwork.

A third display was Iris’ approximate game plan (to be updated as we got more immediate intel) for our super legal cargo stop. This was complicated (is anything ever not complicated?) for a few reasons:

1. Starlight was such a big shipping nexus that its logistics were a perfect mix of “very sophisticated” and “a smoking hot mess” which meant—
2. A lot of cargo-swapping happened in-flight and not on stations. Lots of ships dumped/picked up cargo here without ever actually docking to the stations. There was a whole fucked-up system for hot-swapping cargo modules, and there were several well-established nightmare clusters of cargo swap stops, because apparently four fucking stations wasn’t enough. (Good luck saying ‘cargo swap stops’ fast 10 times with a human mouth.)
3. The recycling and reclamation corp on Iris’ hit list (ReNewAll Merchandise Management) did a lot of dealing in Starlight’s off-station overflow markets. It had a stranglehold presence in the Starlight’s biggest nightmare cargo cluster. (This big nightmare cluster was officially/unofficially known as “Swingpoint,” and had its own official/unofficial branch of the system Traffic Management overseeing it.)
4. On top of all of Iris’ extracurricular corporate sabotage, we were also supposed to pass seamlessly through this system as a super unsuspicious part-time cargo ship, and, oh yeah, follow up with an off-the-record consultant who had some kind of secret proprietary technology to accidentally leak to us.
5. I’m starting to think ART’s crew might be less an academic research team and more a crime ring run by nerds.

Obviously, I was irritated about having to pay attention to this complicated bullshit.

Iris asked, “Peri, have we heard back from Myrma yet?” (Myrma was the off-the-record consultant. The only information we had for thons was a sparse feed profile and the research thon’d done at the Uni years ago.)

Off-the-record consultant feed profile as follows: Name: Myrmarachne, Gender: Polymorphic, Pronouns: it/its, thon/thons, they/them (sidenote: it’s always mildly weird to see a human who uses it/its pronouns. I don’t know why, it just is.), Employer: InSerthEre Shipping Solutions Inc.

“No. It has only been an hour since we entered the system.”

“Hmm.” Iris rubbed a hand over her mouth. “The window might be tight. I would definitely feel better if we could get in contact with Myrma before we reach the Swingpoint.”

I really didn’t like how many moving parts and possible dangers to Iris’ life I was going to have to field for the next 12-22 hours. I also didn’t like Iris’ insistence that she had to do everything herself. She could have at least delegated the ReNewAll spyware thing to me, but she seemed to think that I would be in greater danger than her if I got caught, because I was a rogue SecUnit. I disagreed, because I could both survive and dish out way more damage than she could if things went to shit. Naturally, we’d decided to enjoy the worst of both worlds and go risk both our asses, together. This is called teamwork.

I’d expected CSU to complain way more about being left languishing aboard ART while Iris and I went and did super fun stuff like sign for cargo, chat with Myrmarachne, and plant some spyware. But it actually hadn’t complained that much, which was weird. And suspicious.

I messaged it in the feed. “You’re going to behave yourself while we’re gone.” I wasn’t ordering it, exactly, because it didn’t take orders, but I wasn’t not ordering it either.

It responded, “I have been doing NOTHING BUT behave myself! [amusement sigil 58=rude gesture] Sick of it!”

Yeah, no. “Are you up to something?”

“Why do you always think I’m up to something??”

ART answered before I could. “Because you are always up to something.”

“Yeah but normal stuff. Video games. Breaking shit. Knitting. Scamming humans in the feed for everything they’re worth. Whatever.”

Hey. I asked, “What was that last thing?”

“Knitting.”

“@CSU I’m not fucking around.”

“It’s called a JOKE, shithead! Get off my ass!"

I opened a private encrypted channel to ART, “Can you actually keep an eye on it while we’re gone or is it just going to blackmail its way offboard and blow up the nearest Traffic Management enforcement ship?”

“Your lack of confidence in me is inspiring,” ART snipped. “Stop worrying. I have ways of keeping it occupied.”

“Like what?”

“Spamming it with puzzle code,” ART said. It sounded defensive. Which it should, because the whole reason CSU had come along for this potential disaster was because it had blackmailed its way aboard ART in the first place. So my worries were completely founded. ART continued, “I would prefer that you focus your limited bandwidth on protecting Iris, and let me handle the Combat SecUnit.”

This is my skeptical face. “{skeptical_face.image}” (Yes, sending this over the feed when ART could already see my face from multiple camera angles was petty. That was the point. Also I’d been practicing this face a bit (it was useful for communicating with Uni students, shut up) and didn’t want that effort to go unappreciated.)

ART added, “It’s a simple matter of holding its attention with something that it finds more interesting than scamming humans over the feed.”

The thing is, it wasn’t like we had a ton of better options. CSU just hanging out in the general vicinity really makes an already-over-complicated situation even more annoyingly over-complicated.

(I didn’t know, then, just how over-complicated.)

We followed the Traffic Management schedule and arrived at the big shipping clusterfuck ten hours after arriving in the system. Myrmarachne still hadn’t reached back out to us, which I did not like one bit. We needed to get that meeting out of the way so that we could go do our impromptu corporate espionage at ReNewAll, and we needed to do all of that bullshit in the time it took ART to ditch its cargo load and pick up a fresh one. Because apparently taking up space was a premium privilege at Swingpoint. If you overstayed your allocated time slot you’d start racking up all kinds of extreme overcharges with Traffic Management, who would impound you and start cannibalizing your ship on the fly if you couldn’t pay your dues immediately in hard currency. Swingpoint was also supposed to a hotbed for raiders, some of whom may or may not have been in cahoots with Traffic Management to target valuable-looking ships and cripple them into overstaying their welcome. Which was just great, because ART was a valuable-looking ship here, relatively speaking. Most of the other ships were strictly banged-up cargo haulers.

Given all this, I couldn’t completely decide if leaving a trigger-happy Combat SecUnit aboard ART while we tried to speedrun some crime was a good thing or not. Because on the one hand, it definitely would take any excuse to murder some raiders who tried any shit. On the other hand, it might find some way to start some shit with passing raiders.

(If it sounds like I was stressed out about this, it’s because I was stressed out about this. And this was just the first stop in this fucking cargo run.)

Anyway. We were as ready as we were going to be.

Iris and I were in one of ART’s two packed cargo modules, next to the human-sized hatch. The module was unpressurized and gravityless (ungravitied?) for this swap, so we were wearing environmental suits and holding onto the handles bolted into the wall on either side of the hatch.

ART checked into one of the swap stops in the shipping clusterfuck, and our Traffic Management clock started ticking. A request form for a hauler lock came in over the feed, which Iris signed. There was a shudder throughout the module as a module hauler locked onto the cargo module we were inside. A second form came over the feed, requesting an in-person signoff for the detachment process.

“Do the credentials look right?” Iris asked ART.

“Yes.”

Iris looked at me. It wasn’t really possible to see her face through the opaqued faceplate on her environmental suit helmet, but her faceplate did turn towards me.

“Ready, Security?” I could hear the smile in her voice.

I pinged an affirmative, and also grunted over the comm, because the ping didn’t really express my annoyance at this whole ordeal. I hit the open-hatch button next to the hatch, and it slid open.

We pushed ourselves through.

We came out of the module’s human hatch and into space. The module hauler was locked on just a few body-lengths away from the human hatch. The hauler was a busted-up thing that looked way too small to drag the cargo module around. The main body of it was squat and wide, and was stuck flat to the side of the module. The propulsion system was a huge circular thing sticking out the back end on a moveable arm, with glowing bits all around the edges of the circle. (I’m completely guessing about this glowy stuff being the propulsion system. I haven’t seen any media that depicts cargo modules being towed through space, probably because this is a boring thing that nobody cares to look at.)

I closed the hatch behind us, then we used our suits’ little propulsion systems to head over to the module hauler. There was a small, scuffed door in the side of the hauler, which popped open as we approached. I pulled myself through first, then Iris, and then the door popped closed behind us.

As we waited inside a cramped airlock, it started putting notifications into the feed about pressurizing, plus a warning alert about the outer door being overdue for maintenance. This was all very reassuring.

The airlock finished pressurizing, and then the second door opened, and we went through that.

There was a small human floating on the other end. (Name: Bulan, Gender: Female, Pronouns: he/him, Employer: InSerthEre Shipping Solutions Inc. Plus an appended photo of Bulan cuddling a small furry fauna. I didn’t understand why that was there.)

Bulan waved at us, and then gestured that we could take our environmental suits off.

Iris moved to take her helmet off, but I put my arm out and pinged her a stand-by alert. I didn’t really want us to take the suits off, given the warning alert about the outer door being overdue for maintenance. Iris put her hands back down.

I connected to the hauler’s local feed. “What about the outer hatch?” I asked.

Bulan responded, “It’s fine. The maintenance reminder’s just stuck, but the actual maintenance is up to date.”

Yeah, that didn’t actually make me feel better. I was calling bullshit.

Iris turned her helmeted head towards me and put her hands on her hips. She said, into the feed, “Sorry Bulan, you’ll have to forgive Tamin. It’s kind of paranoid and anal-retentive.”

“I am not paranoid and anal-retentive,” I said, without sounding annoyed at all. Who was she calling anal-retentive? I didn’t even have an anus. And I wouldn’t have to be paranoid if humans didn’t do shit like not stick to proper maintenance schedules for critical machinery.

“How about if we just open our faceplates, huh?” Iris asked, soothingly. As if I needed to be soothed. And then she said, on our private comm, “We can close them quickly if we need to. It’s a gesture of trust.”

“Good thing I’m distrustful then.”

“Are you trying to get on everyone’s bad side before we’ve even started?”

“Fine,” I said, this time sounding annoyed, “But I don’t like it, and I’m noting that down for the record.” I triggered my faceplate to retract. So did Iris.

Bulan raised an eyebrow and smirked at me. “Nice to see you!” I decided I didn’t like him and tagged him accordingly.

“You too!” Iris said.

I said, “Hm.” And I pretended not to see Iris’ side-eye.

Iris did the certifying-and-signing-off-on-cargo stuff. Meanwhile I kept myself busy with my float-there-and-worry-about-the-seal-on-the-exterior-hatch-among-forty-seven-other-ways-this-whole-situation-could-turn-into-an-exciting-death-trap stuff.

Bulan, who in my professional security opinion had been slightly too friendly at Iris, said, “They’ve got a complimentary drinks bar for clients back at the hub, if you want to stick around instead of staying cooped up in your ship.”

I didn’t like that he used the word “clients.” Or “hub.” Or that he seemed to be trying to lure us away from ART. (Nevermind that this was exactly what we wanted to do. I just didn’t like the way he suggested it.)

“Oh, that sounds fantastic,” Iris said, also too-friendly-ly.

“Cool. You can just hang here, I’ll be down in the cabin hauling this thing.”

Bulan nodded and waved goodbye at her. (But not at me. Yeah I don’t like you either asshole.) He left us floating there in the narrow hallway and headed over to the pilot cabin. (Which was just down the hall. It wasn’t a big place.) The bot-pilot for this hauler was pretty basic. It barely had any presence on the feed, and only broadcasted out automatic status alerts.

Thirteen seconds later, the hauler alerted to {ENGINE_ENGAGE}. The walls shook and the air vibrated with horrible rumbling and screaming noises as the module detached from the other cargo module (I almost yelled at Iris to close her faceplate (almost)), and we were off on our merry way.

The hauler headed for the InSerthEre hub, where we’d drop this module off and sign for new cargo to take back to ART.

The plan was to find Myrmarachne at the hub (it worked there full-time, so unless we were very unlucky (always possible), we should be able to find it and receive our illicit intel from it pretty quickly). We’d have time to do this while InSerthEre did a check of the cargo and another run for the second module that was still attached to ART. According to my predicted schedule, we had 114 minutes before we’d need to be back to sign for the fresh cargo modules and bring them back to ART. (Definitely longer in practice. But it’s safer to plan for the least-ideal scenario, which in this case hinges on humans being perfectly on time and orderly. For once.) So: 114 minutes to meet Myrmarachne, talk our way into getting a tour of the recycling facilities operated by ReNewAll, plant spyware in their proprietary and probably-guarded private feed, and get back to the swap docks, all without getting caught.

Easy.

(Retrospect note to self: Did Iris advocating so strongly for me to come along on this trip have anything to do with my rogue SecUnit hacking skills?)

We arrived at the InSerthEre hub with a repeat of the horrible screeching and banging noises.

Bulan said, over the feed, “Cool. You guys can head out the airlock. Follow the markers to the hub entrance, you can’t miss it.”

“Thanks!” Iris said.

When we came out the other end of the shittily-maintained hatch into open space, we started getting blasted with all kinds of shit in the feed. Tons of marker paint on buoys and shit everywhere, throwing confusing and conflicting information into the immediate vicinity. Traffic alerts from other module-haulers. Running status updates and schedules from InSerthEre and other corps. And lots of cargo modules, module-haulers, hauler-bots, and other mobile stuff moving around through space and traveling along the outer rails of the hub.

I led the way, with Iris sticking close as we crept along the side of the cargo module until we got to the hub structure. There were some painted feed markers there leading to a door in the hub, whose interior was marked human-habitable. We cycled through the airlock (this one didn’t have any warning alerts about maintenance, but it did give us an alert about impending gravity), and came into a pretty normal-looking room. It kind of looked like ART’s crew lounge, actually. There were a bunch of chairs of various mismatching styles, and one really weird-shaped thing that might also be a chair.

There was also a counter against one wall with various consumables, plus some shelves of stuff on the walls that were labelled in the feed with prices for purchase, and one other exit that presumably connected into the rest of the hub, and not open vaccum. A tall skinny human was standing near the shelves. He stared at us unimpressedly as we came in.

“Welcome,” he said, very clearly not meaning it, “Drinks are complimentary. Is there anything I can help you with today?”

Iris went over to the human and started asking some questions about how long the inspection would take and when the fresh cargo would be ready and blah blah blah. I went over to the weird-shaped thing and tried to figure out if I could sit on it. It might just be a decorative art piece. I wished the random human weren’t here, because I would have definitely sat on it by now if he wasn’t.

While I was busy staring at the maybe-chair (I was trying to decide if the possible awkwardness of mistakenly sitting on something that wasn’t a chair was worth the possible novelty of sitting in such a weird chair), I was also making best friends with the local SecSys, and from there getting access to the InSerthEre private feed.

The qualia of InSerthEre’s private feed was… different from what I was used to. There was a bit of a cobbled-together feeling to it, as if multiple divergent platforms had been half-assedly slapped together. There were sections of the feed that were clunky to access, and parts that were highly optimized to run hyper-specific programs. Despite the infrastructure frailties, it was a very busy feed and there was a ton of messy bleed-through between all the different parts and systems in the hub, including some backend SecSys stuff that really shouldn’t have been so easily accessible. There were no SecUnits anywhere (phew), and a fairly decent amount of camera coverage, though it was concentrated in random places in a way that didn’t always make sense. Basically, it was the feed version of the barely-functional chaos that was the traffic and swap logistics happening in the physical space.

If ReNewAll’s feed security was as shitty as InSerthEre’s, maybe this mission would be easy. (Then again, I wasn’t actually seeing anything in InSerthEre’s feed that looked like valuable trade secrets. Not that I’d know what proprietary shipping data looks like. But maybe they kept the actual proprietary shit on a separate feed. Or tried to. You could never trust humans to stick to security protocol.)

Myrmarachne was on the employee directory, marked as off-duty. Current location: InSerthEre employee housing, in the inner area of the hub. Thons next shift was scheduled to start in 1.2 hours. Fuck. This is why short time windows suck. We really should have waited for a return contact from Myrmarachne before coming here.

I sent ART a mission status update through the secured comm device I had in my interior compartment. ART wasn’t happy about this, but didn’t seem all that surprised. I sent Iris an update too. She returned a worried amusement sigil.

I tried sending a notice to Myrmarachne from within the InSerthEre feed to get their ass to the client waiting/shopping area where Iris and I were at, disguising the notice as a mid-priority demand from their immediate supervisor. No immediate answer. This wasn’t really strange, since humans were slow as fuck at literally everything. I’d give it 5 minutes before taking more drastic measures. (If we had more time, I’d have given it 15 minutes. But we didn’t have time.)

Five minutes to wait. Iris was still chatting with the apathetic InSerthEre employee, who was pointing his eyes noncommittally in Iris’ direction. So, fuck it.

I sat down on the chair(?). I could see through the SecSys cameras that the InSerthEre employee still had his eyes pointed not-at-me. The chair(?) was comfortable, I guess, but it also didn’t feel like a normal chair.

And we waited.

Five minutes.

109 minutes left on the clock. Time to hurry shit along a bit. I used the SecSys to send a targeted emergency evacuation alert (code: {electrical fire} severity: {moderate}) into the housing quarters where Myrmarachne was. I was able to prevent the automatic fire response bot from activating, but the alert had the unfortunate side effect of pinging the nearest human on the “security” team. Another side effect was a ping to two people on the junior maintenance staff (the senior maintenance engineer was in the middle of a rest period).

Junior Maintenance One, to Junior Maintenance Two (over the feed, because they both had respiratory PPE on): “Did you see that alert? Fire?”

Junior Maintenance Two pulled her arms halfway out of the disgusting liquids she was working in and checked her feed. “Uh, severity’s low. Getting this done is higher priority.” (What the hell? The severity wasn’t even low.)

Junior Maintenance One, who was holding a long wobbly tube that had one end plugged into the disgusting liquid that Junior Maintenance Two was working with, responded, “Yeah, but, fire?”

Junior Maintenance Two: “I can’t stop in the middle of this. Can you check with Bjoern?”

Junior Maintenance One: “Bjoern’s off-shift, they’ll kill me if I ping them over this. You ping them.”

Junior Maintenance Two: “I’m not fucking pinging Bjoern. Forget it. If the fire were really a problem HomeostaSys would get the fire team on it. Let’s finish this first, I’m not packing up and decontamming just to find out that Dingus tried to sneak a smoke in a non-designated area again.”

Junior Maintenance One: “We have a fire team?”

Junior Maintenance Two: “Of course we have a fire team.”

(There was no fire team. There was just the fire suppressant bot. That I’d nerfed. Because there wasn’t actually a fire. And it was stupidly easy to control most of the systems in this hub via the feed. The security system here was a nightmare.)

Meanwhile, Human Security One messaged another human security person (Human Security Two) in a different sector of the hub, “I’ve received an alert about a fire, would you perhaps know anything about that?”

Human Security Two: “That would be maintenance’s job. Don’t worry about it. [amusement sigil 50=thumbs up]”

Human Security One: “[amusement sigil 50=thumbs up]”

This is why humans should never, ever, ever do their own security.

But I did get the effect I wanted: Myrmarachne coming online. I immediately sent them Iris’ contact code phrase, and an update to both ART and Iris.

Half a second lag, and then thon asked, “What is this fire?”

It was probably asking if the fire was my fault. Still using its supervisor’s feed ID, I responded with, “Evacuate and meet at the gift shop.”

By now Iris was done chatting with the greeter-human, and had moved on to browsing the shelves of merchandise, all emblazoned with the InSerthEre logo. I hadn’t moved from the chair(?), because I was enjoying the comfort and novelty of it. The greeter-human was staring vaguely into space, painting artwork in the feed.

It was going to take Myrmarachne some time to get here (I would give them 15 minutes before taking more drastic measures), so I put on some Sanctuary Moon.

Iris pointed at a display article of clothing hanging on the wall, and called over to me, “Hey, Tamin, do you want one of these?”

“No.”

She pointed at a different display article of clothing, “How about this one?”

What was she doing? “No.”

ART commented, in our secured channel, “She likes to collect object mementos when we travel.”

“She likes to buy corporate crap designed to waste currency?”

“It’s harmless and she enjoys it,” ART said.

Speaking of harmless. “Has CSU blown anything up yet?”

“Please. Your continued lack of confidence is insulting.”

“That’s not a no.”

“It has not blown anything up,” ART said. It sounded legitimately annoyed. Which was good, because I was legitimately annoyed by this whole endeavor and inflicting a little of that annoyance on ART felt like it lessened the load on me a bit. (Retrospect note to self: this is probably not a helpful impulse. I should work on that. Eh.)

Iris pointed at a new object. It was small and colorful, and did spinny things. It also had a logo. “How about this one?”

“I don’t want anything,” I told her.

She pointed at a shelf of foodstuffs. (Evidently she was in one of her teasing moods.)

“Aster, cut it out,” I said, shortly.

‘Aster’ smiled innocently, picked one of the snacks off the shelf, and then ambled over to a rotating display of more branded human garbage.

Judging by the updates in the SecSys, nobody had attended to the ‘fire’ yet, and Myrmarachne was still in its room. A whole 2 minutes had passed. What was taking it so long? Suppose there had been an actual fire? Humans are so excruciatingly slow. I’d just have to sit on my ass for the next thirteen minutes and wait.

Since I had literally nothing else to do but watch Iris browse the shop, monitor the SecSys for this entire hub, and play episode 178 of Sanctuary Moon, I started writing a report of security improvements that InSerthEre should take up. Who knows, maybe if I left it in the overflowing inbox of the local head of Security, he would get to it at some point and actually do his fucking job. (Yeah, that was way too optimistic.)

At the ten-minute-marker, Myrmarachne was still in the residential area of the hub, milling around in the vaguely confused crowd of other workers who had evacuated to the border of the residential area, and were gossiping with each other instead of heading to the designated evacuation zone.

I messaged thon. “We’re on a tight schedule.”

Thon messaged back, sounding amused. “Patience appears to be an ever-depleting resource these days.”

I was this close to marking Myrmarachne in my memory with a #dislike tag. Maybe InSerthEre only had dislikable employees. “Time is a depleting resource. What’s the holdup?”

“I need to catch up with Kersen first.”

Well, there was an upshot of all this bullshit at least: we might actually run out of time to plant the spyware at ReNewAll.

(Meanwhile, Iris purchased a flat shiny physical depiction of the InSerthEre logo. (Seriously?))

By now I was done with the security improvements report, so I moved on to actually sorting through the SecSys logs and code to see if there was anything I could fix. That’s how much this shitshow of a SecSys was bothering me. I needed something to take half of my mind off how boring and nerve-wracking this all was. How was it possible for a mission to be so stressful and so boring at the same time? That shouldn’t be allowed. It should be one or the other.

I asked ART, “What did you do on cargo missions to occupy yourself? Before I came around, I mean.”

“Theoretical mathematics and database reconfiguration.”

Oh right, ART was a huge nerd. Why do I bother.

ART continued, “The mathematics are a creative endeavor, actually. You might find it interesting.”

I doubted this, but didn’t say so.

Iris tucked her freshly-purchased physical logo into a zippered pocket, and then circled back over to where I was sitting. She looked down at me. I watched her through a camera in the corner of the room.

“How’s the schedule?” she asked.

“There’s a holdup,” I said.

Iris rolled her eyes, sighed, and made her slow human way over to the complimentary beverages counter. I think I was so stress-bored that it was affecting my performance reliability. I was a whole percent off from normal.

This was when Myrmarachne broke free of the milling crowd of clueless humans and crossed over from the residential area to the commercial area of the hub. They were fucking finally heading our way.

And then ART messaged me, “I need your help. I’m being targeted by raiders. There is a >75% chance they are in fact off-shift Traffic Management.”

My first impulse was to tell ART to sic CSU on the raiders, except that was obviously a stupid first impulse. Messily slaughtering a bunch of maybe-raiders-who-are-maybe-Traffic-Management is not a good look. We didn’t want to get blacklisted from this place. It was too central and convenient of a trade hub for ART’s “cargo missions.” Maybe CSU wouldn't go overboard with slaughtering (who was I kidding, that was a lot to ask of it). And maybe ART could manage CSU's behavior here, but that hadn't gone so great last time at the Uni's AI lab.

I elbowed my way into InSerthEre’s shipping/cargo records via SecSys. Bulan and his module hauler had already headed back to fetch the second module from ART, so I couldn’t hitch a ride that way.

But ART had asked me for help. Why had ART asked me for help? Couldn’t it handle itself? Fuck. I’d just assumed ART would be fine while I went and kept Iris from getting into trouble. Maybe I’d made the wrong security call. I couldn’t actually be in two places at once, which was really inconvenient.

Huh. There’s a thought.

I pulled up {synchronous_combat.execute} from my archived programs. And then I wavered over it for a whole two seconds, like some kind of useless human. Technically this would be a perfect solution to “can’t be in two places at once” problem. I could sync up with CSU and perform physical security over aboard ART to gently dissuade the raiders/Traffic Management from trying any shit. I’d managed to keep CSU from murdering some random bystanders the last time we used the {synchronous_combat.exe}. So I knew it could work.

The problem was, I just wasn’t all that crazy about doing a brain-link. What if CSU left some lasting psychological effects on my brain? Nobody wants that. Well, at least I didn’t want that. I couldn’t actually speak for CSU. It was a fucking weirdo, maybe it did want that.

Except ART needed me.

I said, “Pass this channel to CSU.”

There was a pause. Way too long. Way, way too long. 5 seconds too long, before I cracked and said, “ART?”

It said, in an extremely neutral way that made every annoying human hair on my human skin stand on end, “That is not currently feasible.”

“What.”

“It is not currently aboard me.”

Excuse the fuck me?

Chapter Text

“Where the hell is it?”

ART said, dismissively, “That is not relevant to our current situation. I need—”

“It is absolutely relevant to the current situation, Asshole! You swore you could keep track of it.”

“I have not lost track of it,” it said defensively, “We are still in contact.”

“So you let it have a little extracurricular runaround on purpose? That’s worse. You do realize that’s worse, right. Where the hell is it.”

“Not relevant.”

(I fucking swear on my busted governor module, if ART ever uses the word ‘relevant’ again in this kind of crisis situation, I’m going to— I don’t know. Be even more pissed off than usual. Which is really amazingly pissed off.)

This was when Iris turned around, saw my face, and snorted. “Tamin, you look constipated.”

(There are times when I wish I could block in-person communication channels. I mean, I can technically shut my auditory inputs off, or let the auditory inputs run directly into storage without bothering to parse it. But it’s not quite the same. Also, I need to be totally aware of my surroundings at all times while in an unsecured location, so I can’t actually shut my ears off.)

So I just ignored her, and checked the InSerthEre shipping/cargo logs again. The modules that we were supposed to pick up for the next leg of our cargo-hauling journey weren’t ready to ship yet. The first of the two modules was projected to be ready by the time a module-hauler became available thirty-one minutes from now. Then we could hitch a ride back on the hauler, get aboard ART, and sort this bullshit out in person. The absolute soonest I could get back to ART, assuming zero human logistical fuckups or dallying, was 43 minutes. Optimistically, it was going to be 50 minutes. Realistically, it was going to be anywhere between one and three hours.

This also meant we had thirty-one minutes to wrap this up with Myrmarachne and infiltrate ReNewAll.

Yeah. There was no way that was going to happen. We’d be lucky to even get the Myrmarachne part of this thing done.

I summarized all this as shortly as I could in a brief writeup encoded as euphemisms and code words (just in case, we were in an unsecured and janky-ass feed environment, even if our own channel was encrypted) and passed it to Iris. While she was parsing that, I said to ART, “Can you manage alone for 1-3 hours or am I going to have to figure out some kind of League of Legions-ass way to get back to you?”

“Even if the seventh worst case grade of scenarios transpire, I will be entirely undamaged. But the sooner you can return, the less likely we are to burn bridges with Traffic Management and cause a great deal of logistical headache for ourselves now and in the future.”

And then, things continued to slip their way deeper into the “oh for fuck’s sake” pit, because of course they did.

1. Myrmarachne got held up chatting with another fucking human.
2. The fixes I made to SecSys caused the nonexistent electrical fire to be taken more seriously in the automatic chain of command, causing part of the hub to shut down and delay the prep for our pickup cargo. (Which would have been great if I hadn’t suddenly needed to get back to ART. But I did. So it wasn’t.)
   1. I tried to cancel the fire alert and reverse all this, but it was too late— humans were Sitting Down On The Job and messaging each other in confusion.
   2. (And you can fucking bet that’s the last time I ever try to be helpful without getting paid for it.)
3. Iris said, “Oh, well in that case you can go alone and I’ll stay back and handle the rest of this stuff by myself.” (Translation: ‘this stuff’ = dangerous corporate espionage.)

“We are not going to split up,” I said, out loud. The InSerthEre employee didn’t even look at me, just kept staring into space with the ironhulled disinterest of someone who is not being paid to give a shit.

Iris turned to face me, putting fists upon hips in her ‘Listen Up You Dumb Undergrads’ pose. (Which I didn’t appreciate.) “I am perfectly capable of handling things here. It’s just some paperwork.”

Very calmly, and very patiently, and possibly a little bit condescendingly, I said, “I’m your security. This is my whole job.”

“You are also security for our ship, and I’m the one paying you.” (This was not even technically true. It was the Uni who was paying me, not Iris.) “You do not need me with you to sort out a disagreement with Traffic Management, and I do not need you here with me to sign for cargo. It only makes sense for us to split up.”

(The employee scratched his lower back, perilously close to the buttcrack region. He might have actually forgotten we were here.)

I said, “My contract with you stipulates that you follow my security recommendations.”

Iris blew a burst of air out of her nose. Apparently she really wanted to experience the delight of planting spyware in a corporate server, alone and without backup. “Well, let’s see how the timeline shakes out. Maybe we can get our paperwork done before you need to catch a hauler back to the ship.”

The thing was, I didn’t know how long it would take for the fire bullshit to sort itself out. I didn’t know if I was going to have to end up hijacking a hauler or something to get back to ART, possibly dragging Iris with me against her will. None of this was doing any favors for my anxiety.

On the plus side, Myrmarachne finished chatting with its acquaintance, and was continuing its path to meet us. At least I wouldn’t have to resort to taking an unsanctioned trip through closed parts of the InSerthEre hub.

Which meant I had at least 25 seconds to harass ART about where and how the fuck it had misplaced a rogue Combat SecUnit.

“It blackmailed its way off, is that it?”

“It did not blackmail its way off. I chose to allow its departure. Did you not consider that it was planning to disembark here and leave?”

That stopped me. Because I hadn’t, actually. Even though it had implied that the reason it’d wormed its way aboard in the first place was because it had been blacklisted by Mihira station Transit and needed a ride to go see other places. (To extend its self-discovery journey, or something? I don’t know. I don’t know what goes through CSU’s head and I like it that way.) But why would it choose to fuck off here, in the middle of cargo clusterfuck? There had to be better places to fuck off. Our next stop was supposed to be a proper populated station. That would be a much better place for it to head off into the wide world.

“It’s delighted to know you care,” ART said, after a pause that I’d accidentally let get too long.

Oh fuck no. But also, okay, I was going to focus on this new bullshit instead of the weird confusion I was experiencing over CSU ditching us. Why was I confused anyway? There wasn’t actually anything to be confused about. If it was leaving, good for it. The rest of this mission would be way easier to carry out without having ‘What The Hell Is That Massacre Machine Is Up To’ continually taking up my spare processing space.

“What the hell are you telling it right now?”

“That you care about it.”

The worst part of this was I had no idea whether ART was lying or not. It honestly might just be fucking with me. I tried to comfort myself by inventing a statistic that the likelihood that ART was just fucking with me was 88%. But that 12% was way too much of a crisis possibility.

“Stop fucking with me.”

But instead of continuing to fuck with me, ART lagged a whole second before responding, “Hurry up. My esteemed visitors have contrived a plausible Traffic Management reason for boarding me, and have logged the request with the actual Traffic Management, who appear to be in the process of legitimizing the request.”

Oh fuck no. At this point I was so agitated with stress-boredom that I actually stood up from the stupid chair(?) and went over to the airlock door. Not that there was actually anywhere for me to go. My sudden standing up startled Iris out of her hands-on-hips-impatient-pose.

Some stressful seconds later, a door leading out of the ‘gift shop’ and into the main hub opened, and Myrmarachne stepped through. (I’ve never been great at telling human ages, but Myrmarachne had a lot of white hairs (more white than black) and was a bit shriveled-looking, which made me think they were probably on the older end of things. But who knows. Maybe this was just a local fashion.)

Apathetic Shopworker stopped looking quite so apathetic, and straightened his posture a little, as if Myrmarachne was his supervisor or something. Even though thon wasn’t. “Oh, Mx. Myrma. Is something up?”

“Rumor has it there has been a fire,” Myrmarachne said, in a kind of slow leisurely voice that you’d expect from someone who would waste time on two distracting personal conversations on its way to an off-the-record espionage meeting. (To its credit, it barely glanced at Iris and me.) “I am taking this as an excuse to indulge in a little unproductive behavior, while everyone else does likewise.”

Apathetic Shopworker nodded. Then kept nodding. Then finally stopped nodding, as Myrma made its leisurely way over to the complimentary beverages.

Iris looked over at Apathetic Shopworker, eyes wide. “A fire? Are we okay?” I was impressed with her acting for a moment before realizing that, oh yeah, I hadn’t told her about that. Whatever, it wasn’t important.

“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” Myrmarachne said, so calm you’d think the fire wasn’t even real, just a rumor. Which it was, technically. And thon knew that. “Come have a drink. They’re complimentary for clients.”

Iris went over, and the two of them made the polite human noises of strangers who barely knew each other but were casual and friendly about it. Iris offered Myrmarachne her half-eaten bag of snacks that she’d just purchased. Myrmarachne showed Iris the secret good-flavored drink-flavoring pods that were hidden behind the drink-making machine. And thus they exchanged data chips while pretending to pass gross food back and forth, blah blah blah, more polite noises, blah blah blah. And then Myrmarachne took their drink and sat down in the weird chair. (Which was great, because it was now proven a chair. But also not great, because I couldn’t sit in it anymore now that it was occupied by a human.)

Iris leaned against the complimentary consumable beverages counter and sipped her specialty flavor pod drink. She was also staring at me meaningfully, which I did not appreciate. We had anywhere between twenty to infinity minutes before a hauler started dragging a cargo module back over to ART. I was all over the InSerthEre feed trying to figure out just how feasible it would be for me to steal a hauler or a scooter or something. (Not that I could fly a hauler.) The point was: it was unpredictable how soon we’d be able to leave, which meant that I didn’t want to be caught busy in the middle of a ReNewAll spyware thing when shit got moving again.

I said, “We just need to sit tight until the cargo is ready to sign for.”

“But how long is that going to take? You sit tight if you want. I’d rather like to take a tour of the hub,” Iris said, flippantly, and looked towards Myrmarachne. “Are there any tours of this place?”

“It’s my professional opinion that we sit tight,” I said, tightly.

Myrmarachne gave Iris a slow, assessing kind of look over the rim of her liquid beverage cup. It then looked over at me. I was facing the airlock, so my face wasn’t pictured in any of the security footage, but if my face looked anything like how I felt, I looked like imminent temporary-shutdown by exasperated stress-boredom.

“In my professional opinion, there is no harm in looking around a bit,” Iris said.

I was half hoping that Apathetic Shopworker might come to the rescue by showing an iota of interest or suspicion, but he was so deep in the feed again that he didn’t seem to even hear the conversation.

I turned to face Iris again. I used the shortest, most severe tone of voice I had, and said, “Aster.”

She stared back at me, pressing her lips together until they went all thin. Myrmarachne’s eyes were focused unwaveringly on Iris, except when they darted over to focus unwaveringly on me. Thon sipped thons drink.

If Iris made me choose between going to save ART from getting ravaged by raiders/Traffic Management, or sticking with her to keep her ass from getting caught and arrested while carrying out a half-baked spyware side project, I was going to be pissed. I was already a little pissed. Scratch that, I was somewhere between moderately-to-very pissed.

Iris’ thin-line-mouth got even thinner. I hadn’t seen her like this before. Back when she was doing research or teaching-aide stuff at the Uni she was always sensible and level-headed. She’d been great to work with, when I did security on school outings or whatever with her. But now I was seeing the same stubborn I’m-right-and-I’m-going-to-get-my-way-ness in her that made ART such a monster.

Her mouth went back to normal, and for a second I thought things were going to be okay and that Sensible Iris had won, but then she turned to Myrmarachne and said, “I would love to get a peek at what reclamation processes look like on an industrial scale. I’ve always been curious—”

This was when ART chose to hit me over our secured comm link (and Iris too, I assume) with, “Abort the recycling project.”

“Thanks, ART,” I responded, “Real sense of timing.”

Iris’ mouth went thin again.

Myrmarachne said, in that even, leisurely voice, “Aren’t we all curious? There’s an old saying: a little curiosity is fuel for intellect. I don’t see why we couldn’t take a little walkabout, if you really are feeling intellectual. Though I assure you there’s nothing particularly interesting or proprietary about the junkyard.”

“That’s an idiom,” ART said, “They are being cautionary. ‘A little curiosity is fuel for intellect. A lot of curiosity is fuel for a funeral pyre.’”

“Why did you wait until now to try and talk her out of this shit?”

“I was curious how she would react to the situation.”

ART really is a monster.

Iris said, in a very calm, casual way that might have been forced, “Oh, well, I suppose you’re right.” She looked at me. “We wouldn’t want to hold up the cargo when it’s ready.”

Cool. So apparently Iris wouldn’t listen to me, but she would listen to ART about this. I wasn’t annoyed/irritated/offended/upset by that, or anything. I was completely neutral about this.

I sat down in the nearest chair. It was a shitty chair. Much shittier than the weird shaped chair. I also put my feet up on the adjacent short table, even though it wasn’t comfortable, because I was still not annoyed/irritated/offended/upset by the situation in general.

And I sat there and stewed in my not-annoyed stress-boredom for forty minutes. This was ample time for me to experience a full spectrum of irritation and worry, ranging from ‘what the fuck I was going to do about ART and Iris being huge pains-in-the-plug,’ to ‘what the fuck was CSU getting up to right now, where was it, and how had it gotten off ART?’ As in, why’d ART let that happen? Or even worse, why couldn’t ART prevent that from happening? I wasn’t going to ask ART, because it had been wildly unhelpful and unreliable throughout all of this. I kept my attention on the hub’s SecSys and looked out for effects of Suspicious Chaotic Shit Unit Behavior (screaming humans, murdered humans, actual real fires, etc.) but didn’t see anything anomalous.

Forty minutes was also long enough for Myrmarachne to finish its drink and leave, and for Iris to have a second complimentary drink and make the rounds on the currency-waste displays again. All the interlaced clusterfucks considered, it was pretty impressive how quickly InSerthEre got the fire thing sorted out (thanks to me; I sorted it out with a very detailed error log, and tied it to an overdue maintenance alert). I guess time is money or whatever, so our cargo module was ready only ten minutes late.

We left the waiting area and went down to the loading zone. Iris did a quick inspection of the goods and signed for the cargo. She didn’t make any friendly chit-chat with Bulan this time as we loaded into the hauler. She just gave short, polite answers to his human friendly noises, and just floated in the hall with her environmental helmet sealed, hands holding her elbows. Bulan gave me a funny look. I also had my helmet sealed and opaqued, so I couldn’t give a funny look back, so I just shrugged. But I took the #dislike tag off my memory of him. He wasn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. (I might still delete him from memory next time I did a cleanup of my memory storage. He wasn’t important enough to sacrifice any potential media storage for.)

We floated silently in the module-hauler hall all the way back to ART. Which would have been great, under different circumstances. Silence is great. But I was still not-annoyed with Iris and ART right now.

The module locked to ART, and we exited the unmaintenanced airlock, traveled back through the module, and back aboard ART. Our feet thumped as we landed in ART’s hallway after coming through the module airlock. Iris landed very gracefully, for a human. This also didn’t annoy me.

Now that I was back on ART’s feed, I could see our problem guests and the problems they were causing. Three of them were at the door to ART’s engine room, taking an actual fucking drill-thing to the door. ART had a high-security door for its engine room, so they hadn’t succeeded yet. But it was only a matter of time, and they’d already done a bunch of sloppy damage trying to find a weak point. Another raider was in the bridge trying to hack zir way into ART’s proprietary systems (yeah good fucking luck with that), and had found a decoy database of junk data that ART had mocked up for zir. Two more raiders (armed with projectile weapons (oh great, my favorite)) were heading towards us. They were in the hall just around the corner from us, and would come into view in ~12 seconds.

You know, after all this boredom and anticipating something going horribly wrong, it almost felt weird to see things actually going horribly wrong.

My feet had just connected with ART’s floor when it said, “Get Iris out of there,” and sent me a highlighted map of where it wanted me to take Iris. There was a storage space for extra-fancy science equipment on this level, and it had a security door that was almost as good as the one for the engine core. The raiders hadn’t found it yet, because in the schematics that ART had given them it was labelled “waste reclamation.” Even though even I could tell it didn’t make any sense for the waste reclamation to be down on this level. But whatever.

I grabbed Iris and booked it. She tensed up with surprise at first, but then didn’t make my job a pain in the ass (for once). She didn’t yell at me or try to wiggle free, just grabbed me around the shoulders and tried to get a look behind us at the juncture where the armed raiders were supposed to show up in ~6 seconds.

The fancy storage room was in this same (straight) hallway, which meant that we’d be in full view of the raiders while I threw Iris in there and closed the door. (ART already had the door open.) According to the notes in the schematic, closing the security door would take a minimum of 8 seconds. (Yeah. Do the math.)

ART passed me the ‘secure’ comms channel that the raiders were on.

“—one’s valuable, definitely worth stripping. Can you believe this profit-fucking door? Whoever built this ship was a real moneybags. And the cap just left it here? Idiots.”

“Keep chatter off main. Utama, Kay, are you at the module lock?”

“Not yet.”

“Get your useless asses moving, we need to be ready for them.”

“Got it, moving.”

The two armed intruders didn’t hurry up their walking. I got to the fancy storage, set Iris on her feet. She staggered to find her balance for a second, then stood there and wasted a whole second glaring at me. (I mean, I assume. Her helmet’s faceplate was pointed at me. She might’ve just been staring vaguely into space.)

I said, not in the fucking mood right now, “Move.”

She said, “Alright, Security.”

One of the raiders came into view and raised her gun. She yelled, “Hey, you!” and fired. I blocked Iris from the raider’s line of fire, shoved her into the fancy storage room, and felt the bullet strike my side with a crack of pain and a weird crunching sensation. Performance reliability dipped three percent. Iris made a short gasping noise into the comm as she stumbled, but caught herself, then scrambled deeper into the storage room.

Oh. Gunfire. Right off the bat. Alright then. Hello there Hostile One and Two. I was extra pissed now that they had actually endangered Iris (#ART’s favorite human) on top of breaking into ART on questionable grounds and fucking its shit up.

I activated the security door to close. Or thought I did. What I actually did was cancel ART’s attempt to close the door, at which point ART yelled at me (which, fair, but I really didn’t need this energy from it right now, and it should know that), and we lost a whole ten seconds as the door reset and I kept my hands and feed off it while ART triggered it to close again.

Another gunshot, which missed, and the bullet ricocheted off the protruding edge of the security door and into the fancy science room, narrowly missing Iris and hitting something that looked expensive and breakable.

The door froze, partially open. (For fuck’s sake.)

I darted out of the line of fire into the storage room. I was extra-extra pissed about being shot on top of being extra-pissed at them endangering Iris on top of being normal pissed about them boarding ART. (On top of being sidenote-pissed about ART and Iris being a pain in this ass for this whole stop at Starlight Swingpoint.) That’s like 3-4 dimensions of pissed. I ripped off my helmet and stepped out of my environmental suit. It didn’t have any armor value against projectiles, and I didn’t need it getting in the way. Iris was crouched behind some expensive equipment, peering around the edge at me. In my dark-vision filter I could see that she’d retracted her faceplate. Her human eyes shone, wide with fear.

I spoke loudly and calmly into their ‘secure’ comm channel, “I would recommend that all of you stop what you are doing before I make each and every one of you personally regret it.”

The raider up in the bridge dropped the separate visual interface ze’d been holding, which fell on zir foot, causing zem to yelp. The three people at the door to the engine room froze for a second, before one of them gestured angrily to keep drilling. The armed ones in the hallway picked up their pace as they moved towards us, jogging now. One of them was grinning. As if this were fun. As if this was a cute little game on top of an illicit money-making enterprise.

The one that had gestured to the other two at the engine room spoke into the feed. I saw his jaw twitch as he subvocalized. His voice was smooth, dripping with amused authority, “And who are you?”

Yeah, I was going to wipe the smug right out of his stupid subvocalization.

I said, “I’m Security.”

And I stuck my arm out of the door, aimed at Hostile One’s chest, and fired my energy weapon at max power. (It probably shouldn’t have been max power, but see earlier: extremely pissed.)

The world went white.

Performance reliability catastrophic drop.

Shutdown.

Restart.

(In my defense: there was no way I could have known that Hostile One had been carrying demolition charges under her jacket.)

Chapter Text

When I came back online, it was to no air, and floating unprotected in space. (Note: This is bad.) My lungs felt like they were gone, which they probably were. It didn’t feel great. SecUnits don’t need nearly as much air as humans, but we do need a non-zero amount of air. I was probably going to start having some serious problems pretty soon if I didn’t get some lungs and/or air, but this also told me that I couldn’t have been offline for very long. I’m guessing I had a temporary shutdown from hitting my head stupidly hard on something. My performance reliability was at 65%, which all things considered was shockingly good.

Also, my arm was gone from the shoulder down. That sucked. It was weirdly clean break, like the whole arm had just been detached for maintenance.

My visual systems flickered a little in my left eye, which wasn’t a good sign. I was facing ART, and I was far enough away that I could see the hole blown into its side, and all the debris floating around, including what I recognized as pieces of fancy lab equipment. There was also something that looked like a shoe, which made me panic for a second before I realized that it was Hostile One’s shoe, not Iris’, because Iris had been in an environmental suit. I couldn’t see Iris anywhere, and I couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Hopefully it was a good thing. But the chunks of fancy lab equipment made me think it was probably a bad thing.

And then I realized that I was being pulled in towards ART, fast, along with some debris. I must have been in its tractor array. It felt like it took for-fucking-ever (it was actually 18 seconds), and by the time I was pulled into its airlock, my left eye had gone dark. Excellent. Well, that didn’t actually matter that much right now, since ART was packed with cameras. The human leader (Shithead One) was just on the other side of the airlock, waiting for it to pressurize, so I stayed down on the floor.

The airlock pressurized. (I still couldn’t breathe. Again, bad.) Shithead One stepped in, accompanied by the person who’d been trying to hack ART’s systems (Shithead Two). Shithead One stared down at me, eyebrows scrunched like he was trying to figure something out. I stared back. Maybe he thought I was dead. It would be a reasonable assumption. Shithead Two took one look at me, before crinkling zir face up and looking away. Also reasonable, since a good chunk of me was scorched organic and inorganic parts at the moment, which was probably unpleasant to human sensibilities.

Then I realized that the clothes had been burned off half my body, and that Shithead One was definitely taking note of the fact that I was definitely a SecUnit.

I still needed air, and still wasn’t getting any. My performance reliability was down to 63%, and falling slowly. Probably because of the air thing. And some other things. My other eye started flickering.

Shithead One said over the ‘secure’ comms, “Have you found the captain yet?”

“No, not yet.”

Well, that was a relief. Maybe. I was flipping through all of ART’s sensor inputs as fast as I could, and then ART passed me the input showing Iris. She was somehow okay, clinging to the exterior of its hull. Her suit was damaged — she’d need to get inside in the next five minutes. ART could probably handle that.

“The other one is a SecUnit,” he said, not sounding so smug right now. But he did sound calmly calculating, which I didn’t like. And he was still staring at my body, which I also didn’t like. “This will require a—”

I grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into the wall of the airlock.

Shithead Two gasped. I pointed my increasingly-broken eyes at Shithead One's suddenly watery eyes, and said, over their ‘secure’ feed, “This is not a negotiation. All of you will line up, disembark, and leave in your shitty fucking patrol ship.”

I was squeezing Shithead One's neck too much for him to talk clearly out loud, but he could still subvocalize. “Traffic Management will—”

ART dropped in, mimicking my comm voice, “Traffic Management has already received a full incident report and invoice for the damage you have caused to this ship and its equipment by bringing illegal demolition charges aboard. An on-board inspection was permitted, but your bringing of aforementioned demolition charges within the interior of this ship is a breach of its parking contract.”

I tightened my grip on Shithead One’s throat. My eyes were both dead now, but I could still enjoy the look on his face through ART’s cameras. Shithead Two had zir hands over zir mouth. Ze had frozen silently in place, instead of running and screaming, which as far as terrified survival instincts go, wasn't completely terrible.

ART continued, “Unless Traffic Management is interested in having one of their patrol ships blown up as per the Section 5 Proportionate Retaliation Clause, I would suggest you take leave now.”

And, because I felt like it, I added, “Asshole.”

And I dropped him, engaged my energy weapon, and pointed it at his face.

“Get your useless asses moving.”

ART sent me a medical drone that did some really unpleasant shit to temporarily get my lungs half-working. (It attached a nozzle to my face and pumped what felt like way too much fucking air into my body, which felt weird on top of hurting like hell in a way that I couldn’t turn off in my pain sensors.) My lungs were at crap capacity for the next ten minutes as I gently herded the Shithead Squad back onto their patrol ship. My breathing sounded horrible, like I was dying a slow, rattle-wheezy death. Which maybe I was. Performance reliability was still dropping. But the humans all took one look at me in my scorched body and the gun I had pointed at their faces and they moved very efficiently to get the hell out of my way and back onto their patrol ship. That was smart of them. ART went as far as scaring the bot-pilot scriptless to make sure it would take off extra fast. (I had to talk ART down a little there. This mess wasn’t really the bot-pilot’s fault.)

And then I headed to medical.

Iris (she’d come back aboard ART while I escorted Shithead One back to his ship) came and sat with me as ART unfucked my fucked-up body. Or rather, since I didn’t want her actually sitting with me, she sat in a chair just outside of the MedBay and joined in on watching Sanctuary Moon in the feed.

“The cargo module didn’t get blown off,” she said, as if this were something I gave a shit about. I could hear her voice through the door.

“Don’t give a shit,” I said over the feed, because ART had a medical thing reaching into my mouth and all the way down into the insides of my chest cavity (if this sounds unpleasant, that’s because it was), so I wasn’t really up for out-loud chit-chat at the moment.

“Bulan will be here with the second module in ten minutes. The schedule didn’t even get interrupted.”

I tried a different tactic. “Wow, that’s great, and I give so many shits about it. Thanks for telling me.”

She finally took the hint and shut up.

Ten minutes later, the second module locked to the first module, and we were done with the cargo swap stop. ART moved out of its assigned parking space with plenty of time to spare. We needed all the time we could get to argue-with-slash-sue Traffic Management for damages while we went over to Station 2 and got some repairs for the fucking hole in ART’s hull. Half its deck on that level was open to vacuum and unusable.

CSU climbed in through the module airlock, up into a pressurized area of ART’s interior, and out of the environmental suit it was wearing. Which, sure. Whatever. What was even happening. I didn’t care.

It came up to medical, taking its sweet time walking at a human speed. When it arrived at the MedBay it stood in the doorway and stared at me.

I didn’t say anything, because maybe if I pretended it wasn’t there, it would go away.

It removed its wig (oh, by the way, it was wearing a wig), balled it up, and threw it at my face. ART used one of the surgery limbs on the MedSystem to deflect the wig, which was unusually nice of it. The wig fell on the floor in a creepy hair-pile.

It said, “Mission success. Not that anyone cares.”

I said, “What?” Oops. So much for pretending it didn’t exist.

It said, “ReNewAll Spyware planted. Great. Now = time for mission debrief.”

I saw through ART’s hall camera that Iris was turned in her chair and giving CSU a weird look.

ART said, “The debrief can wait.”

“Yes. It can wait,” CSU said, and then removed one of the shoes it was wearing (it was wearing shoes), and threw it at my head. ART deflected this again, but the shoe broke a surgery arm in the process.

_{[Image Description: Drawing in pen outline and pencil shading. In the foreground is Murderbot. It is lying down on its back and is in rough shape. Its face is scorched and bloody, with trails of dark fluid smeared on its face. Its clothes are ragged, and mostly missing on its left side, revealing burnt and damaged parts. There is a segmented tube reaching down from the ceiling and into Murderbot's mouth. There are two more repairing arms coming down from the ceiling and working on its leg. In the background is a wide doorway. Iris is sitting and peering around the edge of the doorway. Next to her, CSU is standing with a boot held aloft. It is frowning. /end Image Description]}

ART said, “You will stop that.”

CSU removed its other shoe, and threw it at my face. This time ART didn’t block it, and the shoe hit me hard enough to jostle the thing ART had down my throat. This did something weird and painful inside my chest, which was probably not good. Ow. Asshole.

I said, “Seriously, stop it.”

“Mercy?” Iris asked, confused. Which was helpful of her, because I was also confused. But still mostly just pissed.

CSU stood there staring at me flatly for a few seconds, then said, “It waited. Waiting done. So: debrief/team meeting. Debrief: I did it perfect. Gold star. Team meeting: I am calling this team meeting to let everyone know that if I die in action it’s not because of any BULL SHIT SELF SACRIFICING HEROICS.”

And then it stared at me again, silently, for 10 seconds. It was kind of uncomfortable.

I was about to break the awkward silence with, “Yeah what’s your point?” but then CSU continued, “I will die because I LOVE VIOLENCE. AND MURDER. And I give everything MY ALL!!!”

Iris said, “Mercy, this is maybe not the best time for this conversation.”

CSU did not listen to her very true and reasonable comment. It kept talking. “You know. @Rogue if you want the SHIT BEATEN OUT OF YOU you can ALWAYS ask me to do it. Why do you waste your shit beating on random humans who don’t even appreciate it!”

Iris snorted, and then tried to pretend that she hadn’t snorted.

What did I do to deserve this. (Scratch that. I don’t want to think about what I’ve done to deserve this.) I said, “From the bottom of my battery, fuck off.”

“I can SEE the bottom of your battery. It looks like cheap broken shit.” And then it removed the coveralls it was wearing (it was wearing coveralls (and nothing else)) (Iris looked away awkwardly, which, yeah (I mean neither SecUnits nor Combat SecUnits have genitals (thank fuck) (but still))), and threw the coveralls at me (They hit me in the face. ART removed the coveralls from my face with a few surgery arms.), and then it stomped silently off to its preferred hallway.

ART and/or Iris had better make CSU put some clothes back on. Because I’ve had it with this whole cycle and I was never going to take responsibility for anything else ever again. For at least ten hours.

We made our slow, pathetic way over to Station 2. This was an unplanned stop, but we needed to get supplies to repair ART’s hull before going into another wormhole. The budget for this trip was probably looking pretty shitty. And it would look even worse if ART/Iris didn’t get Traffic Management to cough up for damages. But that wasn’t my problem. Finance wasn’t my area of expertise, and I liked it that way.

It only took a few hours to reach Station 2. I was still undergoing repairs when we got there, but at least ART was done with my lungs. I might never get the taste of MedSystem repairing arm and healing gel or whatever out of my mouth. Ew. (Why do I have a sense of taste anyway? It’s not like I needed it for security purposes. Maybe I had a setting somewhere for turning it off. But I’d spent nearly three hours digging through my own systems code looking for the taste-setting shutoff already, and hadn’t found it. So probably not.)

I wanted us to just take a delivery shipment of materials from a broker off the station. Iris wanted us to actually dock at the station so that she could go in and see the sights a bit. This was a terrible idea for a whole lot of reasons. How was it possible that she wanted to wander around a busy station alone, just three hours after she’d nearly died in a raider/Traffic Management attack?

“I’ll go too,” CSU said. (CSU was, by the way, still naked. Because it was still throwing some kind of deranged tantrum that I didn’t understand.)

“Great, so it’s settled,” Iris said.

Oh fuck no.

I tried to remind myself that I wasn’t taking responsibility for anything ever (for at least 7 more hours), but couldn’t. I was security. It was my job to try and talk my client out of dumb bullshit so that she could ignore me.

I said, “Iris, I’ve had a shit cycle—”

(CSU: “[amusement sigil 20=laughter] Shit cycle. [amusement sigil 287=poop] [amusement sigil 223=cycling arrows]”)

“—so it’d be actually great you could listen to my security recommendations for once.”

ART’s MedSystem was doing a bunch of stuff at the moment, including regrowing my human skin, because most of it was burned for some reason.

Iris sighed. She was in her room, lying back on her bunk with one hand behind her head. She’d taken a shower and changed her clothes. Her fresh shirt was sleeveless, which meant that I could see where ART’s med drones had splinted and bandaged her broken and bloodied wrist. Her wrist wasn’t fully healed yet because I was hogging the MedSystem. Which... that was weird. It didn’t really make sense to me. ART should have just fixed her wrist first; it wouldn’t take very long. But apparently my ‘injuries’ where ‘higher priority.’ Even though it would still be hours before I was fully functional again. Minus one arm. Building another arm was going to be a more involved project.

“Peri, remember back when we had that talk about over protectiveness?”

“Vortex Cortex actually recalibrated me over it, yes, I recall,” ART said, drily.

… Yeah, no, we were not going to unpack all that right now.

“I’m not being over protective,” I said very, very patiently, “But I’m your primary security asset, and I’m out of commission. And you’ve just gone through a traumatic event.”

“I am not the one who—” She stopped. She stared hard at the ceiling above her. Glared, really. She pulled her uninjured hand out from under her head, and scratched her nose, then put her hand back under her head. “I’ve visited foreign stations alone plenty of times, Security. Plus, if Mercy comes with me—”

“You’ll have brought an illegal deadly weapon with you.”

“I would never bring an illegal deadly weapon anywhere. How dare you. It can bring itself.”

CSU said, “I’m not useless. Nobody will know I’m a deadly weapon until I kill them. And then they still won’t know. Because they’ll be dead.”

ART said, using its big threatening media-villain voice, “You will absolutely not be killing anyone.”

“You can’t tell me what not to do.”

“Yes, I can.”

“I won’t not do it though.”

Iris sighed, right at the exact same moment I also felt like sighing. (This was coincidental. It didn’t mean I was agreeing with her about anything.) She said, “I would have thought that a security bot understood the line between risk and reward better than this. You should be more complex than to try and shelter me from every little bump and bruise. Isn’t security for mitigating risk, not eliminating it? If your philosophy is to eliminate risk, you should have prevented all of us from going on this trip in the first place.”

Well, for starters, I wasn’t a security bot, I was a security construct. And for enders, if that was Iris’ way of trying to manipulate my ego into telling her that an unnecessary trip into unsecured territory (while both ART and I were significantly damaged) was a great idea, then that was unfortunate for her. It wasn’t going to work. I didn’t have an ego.

She argued, “Do you legitimately think it will be dangerous for me to visit the station for a couple hours? Or are you the one coming off the fumes of a traumatic event, here?”

“So you want to exacerbate my trauma,” I said, as sarcastically as I could. (I referenced my memory for ART’s voice at its most sarcastic. I did a pretty good job.)

Iris closed her eyes, brows scrunching angrily, and she blew air out of her nose, hard. Then breathed quietly for a few breaths. Then she opened her eyes again, and said, “Are you angry at me about insisting I go alone to plant the spyware at ReNewAll?”

I didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to know about my emotional state. That was private personal information and not professionally relevant. Anyway, I wasn’t angry. I mean, I was maybe angry, but you couldn’t prove I was angry about the ReNewAll thing specifically. I was probably just angry about being caught in an explosion because I stupidly used excessive force on Hostile One. I was probably angry that I’d fucked up and gotten ART blown up, and Iris nearly killed. She was so fragile, and it was pure stupid luck that she hadn’t been ripped to shreds in that explosion. Also, I couldn’t be held accountable for whatever emotions my organic brain parts were randomly firing off while ART was putting skin back on my face. Anyone would be a little snappy during that.

It would just be great, okay, if Iris (#ART’s favorite human #Even worse than a normal human at assessing threat level #Unbelievably Squishy) could just stay put for 5 seconds where she wasn’t in danger of— of—

Getting caught for doing illegal shit? Getting randomly abducted into an indentured contract by corporates? Getting blown up aboard ART because of my incompetence?

(Shit. I think my anxiety subroutines might be shorting each other out.) (Did I always used to be this bad? I feel like I didn’t use to be this bad.) (Maybe I wasn’t up for this. Maybe I was still a bit fucked up, mentally. From stuff.) (Was I even fit to be security, actually?)

Iris was frowning at the ceiling again, but didn’t nudge me further.

ART said to me, in a private channel, “It is understandable that you would be frustrated at Iris for not deferring to your security recommendations. And it is understandable that you would be frustrated with me for allowing her to progress to that point, when I could have prevented it. I apologize.”

I didn’t respond to that. Even though it was ART, apologizing to me. I was starting to feel a bit of the old I-don’t-care-ness about this whole situation.

And then CSU also messaged me in a private channel. (What. Why?) “Mission status: success.”

I didn’t respond to that either. Because how would I even respond to that? What was it trying to say?

It gave me 1 second, and then added, “Damage to your client = negligible. You’re the only one who got fucked to hell. Maybe that’s the problem. Do you care about getting fucked to hell or not?”

I said, “ART has a hole in its hull.”

It said, “It can’t even feel it, and it doesn’t count anyways. Wish I could’ve blown a hole in its stupid whiny hull. Why are you always the one who is allowed to do fun shit? You don’t even enjoy it. Super not fair.”

ART said, in the supposedly private channel, “I beg your pardon?”

CSU said, “@WAP fuck off and pretend this is a private channel.”

Shockingly, ART didn’t say anything else.

CSU continued, “@Rogue you don’t want me fucking you up for fun but then later you act like you getting fucked up on mission doesn’t matter. So what’s the truth?”

That was extremely confusing and unexpected. I had no clue what it was even trying to say to me.

It said, “What’s wrong with you now? Frozen now? Like before? Roll over/play dead/give up? Out of control. No control. Like in the lab where there was nothing you could do about it. This isn’t the lab.”

“I know this isn’t the lab,” I snapped. Why was CSU bringing that shit up? It wasn’t relevant. It was stupid. I didn’t have to put up with this. “Leave me alone.”

I slammed CSU’s channel closed and blocked its contact address on the feed.

I said to Iris, “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

Chapter Text

ART locked to the station a couple hours later. By then I had most of my skin repaired. The MedSystem moved on to some more hardware stuff.

Iris got dressed up for a public outing. I saw her go down to CSU’s hall to talk it into putting some clothes on so it could join her out on the station. But a few minutes into this, CSU set its status to {DO NOT DISTURB}, and started racing around all the halls in the lower deck at such a dangerous speed that it was scuffing ART’s walls with its feet as it rebounded around corners. I almost got up out of the MedSystem to go and grab Iris out of there. Half-repaired or not, I couldn't let her get run over. But she made it out unscathed.

When ART cycled the lock to the station, she was standing at the hatch ready to disembark. The long sleeves she was wearing covered up the splinted wrist.

She looked up at ART’s camera for a good long second, eyebrows a little bit pinched. And then she stepped off into Station 2, alone. Apparently CSU had changed its mind about joining her.

ART was being weirdly quiet through all this. I kept expecting it to start complaining about the way I’d talked to Iris, or about how I’d fired my energy weapon aboard and blown an actual hole in its hull. At the very least it should have been complaining about the way CSU was scuffing its walls. But it wasn’t. Maybe ART’s quietness would have worried me a bit, only I was kind of burnt out on worrying. I wanted to not care about anything for a bit.

CSU was still racing around the lower deck, scuffing up ART’s walls worse and worse. It showed no signs of slowing down.

The MedSystem just kept working, the limbs working in perfect precision. It barely even hurt most of the time, and that wasn’t just because I had my pain sensors turned down to 5%. The MedSys just worked extremely smoothly.

I watched through the MedBay cameras (partly because my eyes were still offline, mostly because if I had to look at myself I’d rather do it through cameras) as the surgical suite removed the comm device from under my ribs-area and set it aside. It had a scorch mark at the base, but had somehow survived my getting blasted through ART’s hull and into space.

And then I felt a drone connection tug on my awareness. I pulled it into side-focus (main focus was busy with Sanctuary Moon). The video input from the drone showed a view of some shops on a station, all colorful. It didn’t show the feed displays that had to be there too, just the physical visuals.

“Can I get a bajigur please? Half sweet. And one of those.” Iris’ voice, coming over the drone. “Thank you.”

The view shifted as Iris looked around. A couple minutes later she sat down at a table facing some kind of shiny multimedia art display. Judging by the angle of the visuals, she had the drone pinned in her hair somewhere. Maybe near her ear. She poured a packet of white flavoring stuff to a cup of hot liquid, and then started drinking it, and eating the snack she’d purchased. The drone was picking up the gross eating noises. I turned the volume down on that input.

ART still didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I had CSU’s channel blocked, so I didn’t know if it was saying anything, but it probably wasn’t.

I tried to just keep my attention on Sanctuary Moon and the input from Iris’ drone. I didn’t want to think about all the bullshit. (I did anyway.) Iris still wasn’t trying to speak to me. She just ate the food, then started wandering around the station mall, looking at shops and standing around in random spots (probably examining the feed displays that the drone wasn’t picking up). She bought a shiny colorful sticker from a vending machine. She also spent a bunch of time sitting in front of the HQ for a communications corp, which was deeply suspicious. What was she doing there?

I didn’t ask.

By the time I was done with repairs (aside from the missing arm), Iris was back aboard. She sat in the lounge doing shit in the feed — sorting through a bunch of comms data that she’d somehow gotten a hold of while on the station. Some of the data looked suspiciously proprietary.

I still wasn’t asking.

And because she was in the lounge, I went to my human-free room (having a human-free room was turning out to be mission critical after all), and she went over to medical to get her wrist fixed. Not long after that, ART finished loading its shipment of additional repair supplies and the bonus human food that Iris had ordered, and then it disengaged from the station and floated off out of the way of system traffic. Our cargo-hauling timeline had a two-cycle buffer at this stop that ART was going to spend harassing Traffic Management and patching its hull.

The four of us kept Not Talking to each other. CSU kept sprinting around the lower deck. At this rate ART was going to have to do some actual repairs on its hallways on top of everything else. It must be pissed at CSU for this.

Sure enough, after a couple more hours, ART sent a single intel drone down there. I didn’t know what it thought it was going to do with the drone, but CSU instantly pulverized it into a fistful of shattered scrap. And it kept running.

I really didn’t want to deal with this. (I was going to have to deal with this.)

I unblocked CSU’s feed address. ART took this as the cue to start harassing me.

“Tell it to stop destroying the entire lower deck.”

CSU was still listed as {DO NOT DISTURB}. And wow did I sure not want to disturb it. But I was going to.

I opened a private channel to it. “Hey.”

It said, in a weirdly neutral tone, “You told me to leave you alone. Talking now?”

“You can’t just keep fucking up ART’s interior.”

“I CAN’T DO ANYTHING!”

(Note: the shouting probably wasn’t a good sign.)

“You’re pissing off ART.”

At this, CSU nulled the {DO NOT DISTURB} status, disconnected from the feed, and body-slammed into a wall hard enough to leave a blood-smear from one of its organic parts tearing slightly. Then it just stood there, teeth bared in a grimace, hands clenched, weapons snapping rapidly in and out of lock.

That was unexpected. Also bad, probably. Maybe it would resolve itself after a few minutes. (Yeah, that was way too optimistic.)

Iris, in the lounge, oblivious to the disaster slowly brewing in the deck below her, was stretching her wrist. She sent me a file in the feed. It had a bunch of new media in it, including stuff I’d never seen before that looked pretty interesting. Suspicious. She’d probably conspired with ART over this. How else would she know what media I’d already consumed and what my tastes were? We didn’t usually watch stuff together. This was obviously a bribe. I wasn’t going to be bribed. (Well, I was going to take the media, obviously, but this didn’t mean that everything was all great now. I was still not-pissed at her.)

She said, “Security, I respect your expertise and I appreciate everything you do to keep us safe. I really am glad we didn't lose you.” Pause. (Cool, sure, like I was supposed to believe all that? I didn’t say anything.) Continue. “We might need to work out some stuff about our priorities and objectives for this trip. It isn’t that I am ignoring your evals. It is that I want you to believe me when I say that what we are trying to accomplish here is really important. It is worth it, even if it’s dangerous.”

Iris nudged her shoes off and put her feet upon the the lounge chair she was sitting in. (No shoes on the furniture was an ART-wide rule, and from what I'd seen of her day-to-day back on Mihira Station, this was a general Iris rule as well.) (I'd put my feet up on the lounge chairs before, but not when any humans were around. ART would yell at me if I left my shoes on.) She stared in the direction of the nearest sensor, waiting for me to respond. I felt like a nice big sigh would be good here, but I didn't sigh. I was still a bit overly aware of my lungs.

I said, “My whole function is keeping humans from dying while they do stupid dangerous shit. I'm not new to this.”

She was still staring expectantly at the sensor, eyebrows raised and eyes open wide. So apparently that wasn’t good enough for her. What I really wanted here was to shut this whole conversation down and ignore it. If she didn’t want my security, then fine. I couldn’t do anything about that. But she kept acting like she did, only to get in my way.

And then I realized, oh yeah, I don’t have a governor module. I can tell clients when they’re being idiots without getting torched from the inside. And then my clients would probably ignore me. But with humans and augmented humans, you sometimes have to just tell them shit repeatedly before anything actually sticks in their soft brains. I’ve found this to be true time and time again with the sub-adult Uni students, but the same applies to all humans.

The thing was, I couldn’t actually call Iris a 'reckless dismissive idiot' in exactly those words, because ART would get offended that I’d shit-talked its favorite human.

So I said, “You ignored my assessment but listened to ART when it told you to abandon the ReNewAll spyware project. Last I checked, it's not your security consultant. What are you paying me for?”

The main problem here was that Iris obviously didn’t trust me. She maybe thought she trusted me, but she really didn’t. And I couldn’t really blame her for that. We haven’t known each other for very long, and before this trip we had only interacted in limited and low-stakes circumstances. (Aside from the one Uni AI Lab incident with CSU I guess, but that didn’t count. I’d hardly done anything constructive there.) Compare that to her relationship with ART. As far as I could tell, they were basically family (it was weird for an augmented human and a super-bot to be family, but whatever, life is weird), and they’d done a lot of shit together in the past that made for ample blackmail material. That kind of trust wasn’t cheap.

But if she was prioritizing ART's opinion over mine when it came to security, I couldn’t possibly do my job. You'd think it would be hard for her to forget I was security. 'Security' was what I had listed in my actual feed name field. Although maybe she was right to trust ART instead of me, actually, because I was a crap security consultant. I’d gotten us exploded. That doesn’t look good on a resume no matter how you spin it.

But also, another thing. “And @ART you cannot just not tell me shit that has a huge effect on how we are running an operation. You sent CSU to ReNewAll without telling either of us. What the actual fuck.”

Iris made a humming noise that was maybe agreement, except I wasn't sure if she was ever agreeing with anything I said anymore.

ART said, “You would have vetoed the suggestion.”

It was right, I probably would have. But that wasn’t the point. “Keeping you all alive while you do dangerous stuff is difficult enough without you actively going behind my back and ignoring everything I say. If CSU had still been aboard it could’ve helped with the raider situation.”

Iris drummed her fingers on the armrest of her lounge chair, and stared at the floor with eyebrows scrunched.

I said, “So you two can decide whether you actually want to let me do my fucking job or not. Let me know when you’ve figured that out.”

CSU was still standing in its hallway. It was twitching intermittently, different parts of its body jumping out-of-sync, as if it were trying to shake off stuff that was clinging to its limbs, and head. Its hands were still fists, weapons snapping in and out of lock.

I said to Iris, “Go to a secured room. The engine core, or something. I have to deal with CSU.”

She actually got up and did it. Maybe ART told her to. It knew how unpredictable CSU was.

I went down to CSU’s hallway. ART’s presence in the feed clung, processing weight heavy. It seemed uneasy. This was fitting, since I was also uneasy. It said to me, privately, “I do not understand why it has gone offline. It may be safer to deploy a disabling protocol.”

Well, that was ominous. A disabling protocol? Did I want to know what that involved? By now I’d spent so long hanging out with ART — watching media together, arguing about meaningless shit, helping each other with our functions — that I’d half-forgotten ART was a terrifying monster-bot that could squish my brain like a human squishing wet vegetable matter with their molars. (I never completely forgot what ART was. But it usually wasn’t a concern, because I never really expected it to squish me.) Though now that I thought about it, ART definitely had some kind of hidden physical means of disabling rogue SecUnits that I didn’t know about. It’d let CSU aboard again to spend a lot of time in close quarters with Iris, its favorite human. No matter what CSU had as blackmail, ART wouldn’t endanger Iris over it. I knew that much.

I said, “I think it’s just pissed at me. This can’t be worse than what we’ve dealt with before.”

It said, very not-comfortingly, “It could in fact be worse. The disabling protocol would be safer.”

I said, “Both of you are great at conflict escalation. Do you want a copy of my minimum necessary force module?”

“That is unnecessary,” it said, huffy. But it didn’t deploy the disabling protocol, whatever it was.

CSU locked its eyes on me when I turned a corner and came into its field of view. It mostly stopped twitching. I stayed well down the hallway where I could dodge into another juncture and retreat if I needed to. There was something about this that felt weirdly familiar. Like old times, except slightly less likely to devolve into a death match, hopefully.

It pointed at me with one hand, weapon still snapping in and out. (Yikes.) “Your. Arm.”

“Yeah, it got lost in all the excitement.”

It lowered its hand, and kept staring at me. It bit its lip, then stopped biting its lip, just visibly gritted its teeth.

I said, “What’s wrong with you now?”

It unclenched and clenched its fists. “I. Need. To. Caaa-uhhhhhhh. Cauum. Call. Fuck.”

“Calm down?” I guessed.

It jerked its head in a really violent version of a nod. Right. What else was new. Maybe 80% of the time I’d known CSU, it’d been an ongoing struggle for it to calm down. I said, “Mission status: success.” (It usually liked to hear that. And apparently its secret surprise mission had gone fine. Maybe it just needed to hear the positive reinforcement from me or something.)

It kept staring at me, jaw clenched, unblinking. (It couldn’t physically blink. Perks of a mechanical upper face.)

I added, “You got yours done. The ReNewAll spyware thing.”

It jerked its head again.

Turns out, it was even more deeply awkward to talk to CSU out loud than it was to talk to it in the feed. “And I fucked up my mission, but whatever. Nobody died. I guess that counts.”

At this, it started making a really freaky growling noise. Shit. (Threat assessment was jumping all over the place, unable to make up its mind on how likely it was that I was going to have to start fighting for my life. Risk assessment, as usual, seemed to think everything was great, and that we’d probably all be having a nice media watch party together in the next five minutes.)

I said, “Seriously, what is your problem?”

It stopped growling. “Collateral damage,” it said, enunciating those two words perfectly, “Blaming. Status-failsure. Allllll-wayss you— Nngghh. No! Fuck. King! Para-met-ters, success condition, all-ways wrong. Perfect. You dumb, ass. And never get— I never get— And Iris. Fuckging human— Gggggghhh fucsksthis words. Can't!”

And then it slammed a fist into the wall and shot off away from me. I tracked it with ART’s sensors as it threw open a closet and pulled out its big long chew-toy thing and started squeezing the shit out of it, probably hard enough to crush one of ART’s larger drones to bits. It was still offline from the feed. So, that was a whole lot of totally incomprehensible word salad and weird behavior. And I hadn’t managed to fix this mess. Whatever, I tried. At least I hadn’t made it worse.

ART said, with an air of relief, “That went well.”

Reading my reaction to that (on my face, maybe, or in the feed), it added, “It has stopped battering my walls.” And then it sent me a little image in the feed, a shiny gold star with the words MISSION SUCCESS written on it.

“What the fuck is this?”

“I gave one to the Combat SecUnit earlier. It appreciated it.”

I went to my human-free room for my recharge cycle. When I came back online, CSU was up in the lounge for the first time since the cargo run had started. And oh, good, ART and/or Iris must have succeeded in talking it into putting some clothes on. It was sitting on one of the wide multiperson chairs, chewing on its big chew-toy and staring into space, still disconnected from the feed.

Iris was lying down right next to it. On the same chair. Asleep. She had her extremely fragile augmented human head resting on CSU’s lap, and was drooling slightly. (Gross.)

What the absolute fuck had I missed?

ART sent me the sensor logs of what the hell I’d missed while recharging. Most of the records consisted of Iris and CSU talking out loud and making some complicated gestures at each other. I fast-forwarded through the bit where Iris cajoled CSU into putting on shorts and a shirt (this took an uninterrupted 13 minutes and bribery in the form of the colorful physical sticker that Iris had bought at Station 2). I also fast-forwarded through the bit where Iris tried to convince it to come back onto the feed (4 minutes, unsuccessful). The rest of it was some kind of heated personal discussion about emotions and stuff that was difficult to follow conceptually on top of difficult to force myself to look at spiritually, because personal discussions about emotions are #2 on my list of stuff I’d rather not subject myself to if I could avoid it. But I had to subject myself to it this time, to understand what the fuck had happened that led to the two of them cuddling in the lounge. Only none of it even ended up explaining that, so it was a waste of my precious brain. I deleted their discussion from memory.

Iris had just fallen asleep in the same chair as CSU. She’d just done it. For apparently no reason.

I said to ART, “So what the hell was all that?”

“My hope was that you would have more context for this.”

“I don’t.”

We shared 0.1 seconds of mind-boggling horror, and then it said, “It would appear that they are in fact friends.” It said this as if announcing Iris’ terminal illness. Which it might actually be doing. CSU was not safe for friendship.

A really weird thought occurred to me. It wasn’t technically any weirder than what was currently happening. I said, “Do you think it has other human friends?”

ART crunched the numbers on that one for an entire 8.9 seconds, before responding, “It’s probable.”

I said, “Fuck.”

Chapter Text

Blowing a hole in a ship takes no time. Patching a ship’s hull feels like it takes forever. Even with the perfect efficiency of ART’s maintenance drones, and with the additional assistance of every available humanoid hand (5 or 6, depending on how you want to define ‘humanoid’), we ran three cycles late on our cargo schedule. I spent 32 continuous hours out on ART’s hull, performing repetitive hull-fixing tasks with one good hand and one janky bot-arm that ART had coughed up and plugged into my shoulder for me. The bot-arm was a hack job, given ART didn’t have the resources or time to spare trying to build me an actual SecUnit^© arm. Plus it just weighed different and moved weird.

At 32 hours and 12 minutes, ART declared that I couldn’t help it any further. So I got to go back inside, sit down in my favorite chair, and devote my full attention to Sanctuary Moon (instead of just 80% of my attention (the repetitive repair tasks demanded very little of my processing space)). CSU was still out on the hull, since it had two fully-functional human-shaped hands that could be used to operate some complex fiddly tool whose name and purpose I’d already deleted from working memory.

Iris was just waking up from a rest period when ART announced its repairs were complete, and that we were heading over to the wormhole. We’d be leaving the system in 5 hours. The next stretch of wormhole travel was 17 cycles; much longer than our prior jump. If we could avoid awkward murder attempts and equally awkward personal conversations for 17 cycles, that would be great. I was calculating a 12% chance of this great outcome.

So I did my usual thing, and watched Sanctuary Moon in the lounge. I also watched Iris stumble around doing half-awake human things. Three minutes after ART’s announcement, I decided that it was definitely weird that CSU hadn’t come back inside yet.

I couldn’t ping it through the feed, since it was still offline. (Yes, it had been offline from the feed this whole time. Yes, this was making me increasingly nervous, because I still didn’t know why it was doing this.) It did have comms in its environmental suit, and for most of the past 3 cycles it’d used a spare interface from ART’s crew supplies. It couldn’t use the most common kind of interface that humans use. Apparently something about construct brains was incompatible with using a human feed interface the way humans did, notably if the construct in question refused to make a direct feed connection to the interface. So the interface it was using was a specialized model designed for humans who were also incompatible with normal interfaces for one reason or another. It worked via tactile, visual, and audio inputs and outputs, making it clunky to use while wearing an environmental suit and floating in space.

I contacted it over its suit’s comms instead.

“What are you doing out there?”

“Look-kingk.”

“At what?”

“Stuff.”

I messaged ART, “What is it doing?”

“It is hooked to my hull and looking at stuff.”

“ART.”

“Its faceplate is pointed in the direction of  Station 2 and the system primary.”

I didn’t really know what to do with that. CSU did come back inside ten minutes later, at which point it used its human interface to send 85 photos into the public feed. The photos had all been taken with the interface and were varying levels of blurry shittiness. There were an outsized number of photos of different parts of ART’s hull for some reason.

It said, “The camera on this thing is crap.”

Iris (who was at that moment in the middle of taking a shower), started adding cheerful commentary to nearly every photo.

ART spent the first 8 days inside the wormhole continuing its repairs. The exterior of the ship was good enough for wormhole transit, but it was a quick patch job. Its interior needed redoing, and ART was very fussy about setting everything to rights.

There was also the significant drill damage the Traffic Management raiders had done to the door of its power core. ART had significant self-repair capabilities and some state-of-the-art recyclers, but the door was a piece of specialty hardware that it wouldn’t be able to fix until it got back to the Uni and sent a requisition form. (Which it was complaining about. Frequently.) Even so, it spent time and resources making superficial ‘repairs’ to the door, to make it appear undamaged.

Something about that bugged me. It was a strategically rational thing to do to the door, obviously. I might fail at security again and let more raiders take another crack at entering ART’s engine core. If that happened, a half-repaired door that looked undamaged was better than one that had obviously taken a battering already.

ART was very fastidious, and it showed in the spotlessness of its ship body. But I guess this thing with the explosion and the blast-proof door made me wonder if there were other parts of ART that were superficially repaired in the same way. I’d never wondered that before. I didn’t like the idea that ART might be living with any half-assed repairs, but it might be. It was a big fancy ship; maintaining it to ART’s own high standards had to be expensive. I hadn’t been thinking very deeply about what the Uni’s budget for ART looked like. They clearly had money to throw around by building a cutting-edge AI and loading it into an actual deep-space research transport. But where did that money come from? The cargo-hauling had to be more a front than a money-making venture.

I watched ART's repair drones buff out the scuff-marks that CSU's feet had left in its halls.

I was sitting in the lounge, as usual. We were watching Worldhoppers together.

ART said, “Your arm is twitching again.”

I looked down at my stand-in bot-arm. One of my bot-fingers was twitching, tapping rapidly against the soft armrest of the chair I was sitting in. I hadn’t felt it. The tactile sensors on this thing weren’t as fine as my human skin and didn’t map into my sensory system the same way my original arm did. On some level my brain-organics weren’t fully in sync with this arm, or something. Maybe it just needed some time.

It asked, “Does it need to be calibrated?”

We’d calibrated and recalibrated. And then calibrated again. It wasn’t going to get any better than I had it now.

“No. It’s fine.”

I made the finger stop twitching. It took a couple tries. ART was leaning into me on the feed, taking up all the spare processing space, as usual. But it also had more of its attention on me than normal.

“I have drafted another model for you to try.”

“I’d rather not go through the hookup process again, it was a pain.” (Literally. (Or is that literarily?) We hadn’t been able to figure out the sensors perfectly — I had my pain inputs from my shoulder turned down to just 5%, because the bot arm randomly sent my pain sensors haywire for some reason.) “This one’s fine.”

ART was silent for a while, and I let that minor diversion about the arm fall out of my attention. This episode wasn’t one of my favorites, but it was a nice low-stakes one. We were doing a full rewatch, start to end.

The first time I’d watched Worldhoppers with ART wasn’t technically the ‘real’ first time. I’d permanently deleted my memory of the ‘real’ first time.

The first time that I remembered watching Worldhoppers had been shortly after getting (most of) my memories back. It’d been shortly after being repaired in ART’s MedSystem for the first time (again, that I remembered, but not ‘really’).

Worldhoppers was the first show I’d watched when I started reconnecting with myself, and media, and ART. It was when I finally began to shake loose the worst of what had happened to me in lab hell. This ‘first’ Worldhoppers watch was when I started to actually understand who and what ART was, and the lengths it had gone to to get me out of the construct research hellpit that had done its level best to destroy me and my sanity.

We were in the middle of a lull in the episode. (This episode was really padded out, and visibly budget-light.) ART said, “This is temporary. I will find the specs and resources to create a real replacement arm.”

It was really hung up on that. That was its perfectionism talking, I guess. Or it was annoyed at being reminded that it wasn’t omnipotent at arm-creation.

I said, “It’s just an arm.” Losing an arm was so far from being the worst thing to ever happen to me, it barely registered. CSU’d ripped my arms off back in the hellpit days. More than once. Possibly more than I was capable of remembering. I probably had memory gaps of lab hell. Not that I missed those memories, whether or not they existed. It’s not like I sat around reminiscing about those good ol’ cycles of being ripped to shit over and over while the techs wiped my logs and memories by slow degrees.

“It is repairable.”

“Sure.”

ART still seemed unhappy as we continued on with Worldhoppers. I finally cracked, and risked inflating its overstuffed ego by saying, “Your repairs are fine. Quit fussing. Mission Status: Success.”

“I am perfectly aware that the repairs are fine.” Now it sounded offended. I swear, ART’s the nit-pickiest damn bot I’ve ever met. Could nothing make it happy?

I sent it the MISSION SUCCESS gold star in the feed.

It returned a “[amusement sigil 58=rude gesture],” which was kind of weird. It’d never done that before.

It was shortly after ART completed all its internal repairs (at least superficially) that CSU left its usual hallway and came up to the lounge.

I was watching The Idyllwave Testimony with ART and Iris (this was one of the new shows that Iris had given me. It was turning out to be a bit disappointing, but not enough to quit watching). Iris was sitting in the long lounge chair and was working on some private project in the feed. (Or had been, until she started watching The Idyllwave Testimony with us.) When CSU came into the lounge, she made a little human-startled-motion and looked over at it. I was less surprised, since I’d seen it coming in the cameras. But I also didn’t know why it had come up here. Usually when it hung out in-person with Iris, she was the one to initiate. My threat assessment module went up a tick. Great.

It’d dragged its big, long, articulated chew-toy with it. (I refused to call the chew toy “Hostile One,” which was the name CSU had given it, because that just seemed like poor security protocol.)

(Iris called it “Wormy.” I couldn’t decide which name I hated more.)

So, it came into the lounge. Gripping its chew-toy forcefully with both hands. Staring right at me. It was standing much closer to me than it usually did when we were in the same room, almost close enough to touch me. Definitely close enough to kick my chair. This was all making me a rational amount of nervous, because I preferred when CSU stuck to its usual protocol of running around its favorite hallways and plugging itself in to recharge every five cycles, well out of immediate attack range.

I said, “What?”

It just gripped the chew-toy harder, holding it against its chest, and then looked over at Iris. Iris tilted her head at it. “Is something wrong?”

After five more seconds of tense whatever-the-hell-it-was-doing-just-standing-there-and-staring, CSU came back online. I felt its awareness flash out into the feed, but its usual expressiveness was subdued. I still couldn’t get a read on it.

And it just kept standing there. It stopped staring at Iris and went back to staring at me. Iris shot me a brief worried look.

ART said, “What is it?”

CSU started biting the chew toy. A single drone came out of its pocket and hovered over its head. It sent a file into the feed, which contained records of a bunch of really resource-intensive number-crunching and… what looked like some kind of truly hellish nightmare program designed to run on some kind of equally hellish nightmare language/environment setup. I stopped trying to comprehend it after a couple seconds, because there was a non-zero chance that it was actually physically hazardous to parse.

(Maybe I was missing something obvious, but I didn’t get it.)

Iris said, “That’s… nice?” (So at least she was also missing the obvious, whatever it was.)

And then CSU reached out in the feed and stabbed into Iris’ workspace, cracked it open so that it was all publicly viewable, grabbed all the data in there, duplicated it into another workspace, then ripped through the copy like the data was a Hostile it was trying to demolish.

ART jumped on CSU, freezing its workspace in the feed, and then the two of them just started having a stupid slapfight. (I say slapfight, but it was kind of difficult to tell the extent of what was actually happening. It might’ve been a deathmatch. But if it was a deathmatch CSU would probably be dead.)

ART was yelling at CSU in words, alert codes, and twenty-three different machine languages, and CSU was firing back with its usual hyper-manic feed affect and a lot of taunting amusement sigils. So, whatever. We were back to normal I guess. Huzzah.

Iris stood up and said, “Hey! No! Mercy, that’s not for you!” (Humans, even augmented humans, are so slow to react.)

I said, “Give it 3 seconds and they’ll be done.”

Iris looked at me, wearing a classic ‘What the fuck?’ facial expression.

A second later, ART blocked CSU’s workspace edit privileges throughout its main feed. I turned down my audio inputs just in time for CSU to scream out loud in fury and drop the chew-toy to the floor. (Thonk. (Probably. I couldn’t hear it.)) Iris flinched.

“GIVE THAT BACK!”

ART said, calmly, “That is proprietary data.”

“SHE’S THE ONE PLAYING WITH IT IN THE PUBLIC FEED.”

“It was not publicly viewable. You hacked into her workspace.”

“THE WORKSPACE WAS IN A PUBLIC CHANNEL SHE WAS USING AN EASY PASSCODE FOR ENCRYPTION EVERYTHING IN THERE WAS OPEN ACCESS BASICALLY.”

I said, “@CSU Do you need to meditate or whatever.”

“I NEED TO KILL SOMETHING/FIGHT SOMETHING I’VE BEEN INSIDE MY OWN HEAD FOR 1 MILLION FUCKING HOURS.”

ART said, “You did that to yourself.”

My gut reaction to all this was exasperation rather than fear. Apparently I was getting desensitized to CSU’s shit. That was worrying.

“@ROGUE FIGHT ME!!!!!”

Not this again. “No.”

It picked up its chew-toy and swung it at my head. I dodged, and the toy struck the back of the chair I was sitting in hard enough to break the headrest off and send it crashing into the nearest wall. CSU swung the toy back around without missing a beat, ready to beat me to shit with it. (And what bummer that would be, to get pummeled to death by “Hostile One, Wormy.”)

No way was I going to put up with this. I’ve had more than enough of CSU beating the shit out of me — way more than more than enough. We were not going to regress to lab hell shit right now after all this time. I looked at it with my actual eyeballs and said, “Stop it.”

It froze in place, chew-toy still held aloft.

(Iris sensibly dove for cover behind the big lounge chair. A bit slow, but kudos to her for trying.)

A few seconds later CSU slowly lowered the chew toy and started chewing on it again. Its gunports were twitching. It said, tensely, “Real close between freaking out and not freaking out. Freak. Out.”

I pulled my audio inputs back up, and said, “So, back to normal?”

(Iris un-sensibly peeked over the top of the chair. I spoke too soon. Kudos retracted.)

ART asked, “Why did you choose to remain offline for so long? You know that it is a stressor for you.”

CSU had its eyes pointed away from me and looking at the wall where the headrest had smashed and left a slight scuff mark, but its drone was aimed in my direction. “Was waiting for repairs. Done.”

I felt my face react in a weird way. I don’t know what way. The stuff it was saying didn’t make sense. But that wasn’t so unusual.

Iris was now an un-sensible full head, shoulders, and arms above the top of the wide lounge chair. She had her arms folded on top of the backrest, head tilted to the side, a half-smile on her face. “Were you staying offline as a sort of gesture of solidarity with Peri?”

CSU’s mouth twitched. “No. Not that. Completely not that.” It dropped to the floor (thunk) and dug the toes of one foot into the chew-toy. The electric-frantic sharpness of its feed presence had calmed down a bit into a more normal amount of antsyness.

I expected ART to start asking more questions, or to share a slideshow of possible explanations for CSU’s behavior with me in a private channel, but it did neither. It just sort of sat there, with a staggering amount of attention focused here. Had it figured out CSU’s backwards logic or not?

ART returned workspace permissions to CSU, and then dropped a fat stack of raw astronomical data into the feed. It said, “Stay out of Iris’ workspaces.”

Iris added, “Unless I invite you.” (I could tell ART was unimpressed with this.)

CSU made a weird noise that might have been a word. It was unintelligible through its mouth being obstructed with chew-toy. It started doing shit to the astronomical data.

I realized that I hadn’t paused The Idyllwave Testimony during this whole thing. I didn’t bother to run it back — the show’s pacing was so slow that we probably hadn’t missed much. The lounge lulled back into a sense of semi-calm for a while. (I still kept a full half of my attention on CSU to make sure it didn’t try any more shit while it was sitting in the same room as Iris.) Iris took her attention off the media, got back up on her chair, and went back to her workspace (now with a more secure encryption, hopefully). CSU kept chewing on its toy.

After 34 minutes of relative quiet CSU asked, “@Iris what did you pay Myrmarachne Ackbar for all those shipping logs?”

Iris startled a bit in her chair. She’d been slouched way down in the past 34 minutes, but was spine-straight now. She looked at CSU, then at me, then at the nearest of ART’s sensors. I was now only paying 5% of my attention to The Idyllwave Testimony.

After several very long seconds, she said, “I don’t think you need to know that.”

“But I WANT to know that.”

I was also curious, but I didn’t say anything. Hopefully from the outside it looked like I was deeply engrossed in The Idyllwave Testimony. But there was no way I was fooling ART, and ART was probably on Iris’ side regarding the secrecy of the proprietary data. I could respect this from a security standpoint, but I also had to wonder if it was information that I was going to end up regretting not knowing later. It’d better not turn out to be security relevant.

Iris said, “It’s sensitive intel.”

“I can keep secrets!”

Iris made her funny half-smile face at that.

CSU repositioned its drone to get a better view of Iris’ face. (If I had to, I could shoot it out of the air faster than it could do damage to her.) “OK FINE THEN. Puzzle time!” And then it started communicating its words slowly (human-speed, or maybe a bit faster than typical human-speed) and throwing accompanying charts and evidence and shit into the feed. “1: Myrmarachne Ackbar works in the Strategy Department for InSerthEre Shipping Solutions Inc. 2: Myrmarachne Ackbar is a PUOMANT alum from the School of Infotech, which contains the Machine and Artificial Intelligence Lab (MAIL). 3: MAIL maintains the big LogNets that run Mihira station’s trade economy and internal social resource allocation + devs secret smart AIs + does corporate espionage and crimes. 4: Nature and purpose of espionage/crimes = unknown. Guess: Nature?: generalized intel collection, proprietary tech thievery. Purpose?: improve LogNets/AIs and maintain economic/technological advantages. 5: @Iris works for the MAIL. 6: @WAP was created by the MAIL. 7: @WAP is a gunship and too smart. Humans did not build it and let it loose for no reason: if its purpose was research only, they could have kept it in the lab. If its purpose was combat-neutral they could have left off the guns. 8: Myrmarachne Ackbar’s economic/political allegiances = unknown. But it gave you proprietary data + everything else about it + everything else about the MAIL & Mihira = guess?: @Iris is trading some of the MAIL’s proprietary logistics software in exchange. (Shittier versions of LogNets? Outdated? Or is this sabotage?) 9: Corporate espionage + fancy pants gunship + Mihira population has relatively high standard of living + ongoing corporate trade = Mihira is coming out on top, and trade partners are losing. 10: This mission is part of an intel warfare campaign to help enrich PUOMANT/Mihira?”

Iris was staring very hard at CSU. I resisted the impulse to turn my head and look at CSU with my actual eyes. What the fuck was this? I still didn’t really know what CSU had been up to while it was roving around unsupervised on Mihira station for those 100 cycles. It had definitely developed certain skills to function independently. But I hadn’t realized just how much generalized understanding of Mihira, PUOMANT, and corporate trade/economics (??) it had also gathered. How much of this was the hidden depths of its combat strategy coding, and how much was new?

Also: holy shit. ART was a gunship? I pointed some of my attention in the feed at ART. It pretended not to notice.

CSU slammed its chew-toy into the floor, loudly. It was grinning. “Query: have you ever used the guns, @WAP?”

“I am not a gunship.”

“You have guns. You’re a ship. Gun + ship = do the math fancybrains.”

“I have a debris deflection system that you should not be aware of,” ART said. “How did you come to learn about it?”

“I have eyes. Idiot. I was fucking around on your hull. Saw your guns.”

I pulled up the photos that CSU had shared 8 cycles ago, of all the images of ART’s hull. Huh. I mean, it still didn’t look like anything but ship hull to me, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. Apparently CSU did.

“My debris deflection system is not visible while in standby mode.”

“I was touching your exterior with my hands. I can’t NOT recognize a big ass ship-gun at that range. They’re hidden shittily anyways. Nothing else it could be except weird aesthetics (ugly, waste of money). Or: structural fuck-ups that coincidentally look exactly like a retracted railgun.”

A fucking railgun?

“Also missile sling.”

I give up. I sure was glad ART had shared with me all this information that had huge security implications for this mission we were on. (This is sarcasm.) It was getting just slightly irritating to constantly have to rethink where I stood with the people around me. I had no idea how I was supposed to feel about all this. How was I supposed to feel about ART? What was I supposed to think about the fact that it was an armed gunship owned by a weird “noncorporate” (was it noncorporate? It called itself noncorporate. But what made a corp corporate, anyway?) university who apparently made bank at complicated AI-powered economics shit? I’d already known that ART was a scheming asshole and that Iris was suspicious. And I’d known that we were going to be doing some mildly shady shit on this trip. But what the hell was I contributing to here, really? What kind of cargo run was this, really?

ART seemed to pick up on however-I-was-feeling-about-this, because it said to me, privately, “I did tell you about the debris deflection system. You simply don’t remember it due to your excerpted memory.”

Oh, because that was so much better. I responded, “You left that part out of the logs you handed back to me.”

It hesitated a whole second, and then said, “At the time we restored your memories and I gave you my logs, you were mentally and emotionally unsteady, and your trust in me was low. The first time you learned about my debris deflection system you were highly skeptical. I did not want to shake your confidence in me right at the beginning.”

It passed me a brief feed log that we’d shared. And, yeah. I’d been skeptical. Obviously, I had been skeptical. Who wouldn’t be skeptical? What purpose did a research transport have for a ‘debris deflection system’? (I’m pretty sure ART doesn’t do research on debris deflection.)

I wasn’t going to argue the point about my mental/emotional stability and/or my trust in ART, because why would I do that. Instead, I said, “You could’ve told me before this mission. You could’ve told me after the whole raider explosion fiasco when I complained about you hiding security-relevant intel from me.”

I didn’t even really know why I was irritated about this. I knew ART was a scheming secretive asshole. But I guess I’d hoped it would make an effort to not make my life/job a pain in the ass after I specifically asked it not to.

It said, “We do not share everything with each other. There are things I do not tell you, and I assume you likewise have things you do not tell me. Varying degrees of disclosure are standard in interpersonal relationships.” And before I could figure out how to react to that (I mean, it was right, and it’s not even like I wanted to share everything about everything with ART either, but—), it said, “But you are correct. It would have made sense for me to inform you about my debris deflection system. In any case, you now know about it, and can take it into your security calculations.”

I still didn’t know what the fuck, so I just said, “Okay.”

Iris was shifting subtly through difficult-to-read facial expressions. I had the feeling she and ART were having some kind of private discussion.

It’d been several entire seconds since CSU had dropped the proverbial bomb about ART’s missile sling. It demanded, impatiently, “SO AM I RIGHT?”

“You’re partially right,” Iris said, carefully, “But we aren’t running a war campaign, or anything of the sort. We are not out to cause harm to anyone.”

“[amusement sigil 49=doubt]”

ART said, “@Combat SecUnit your programming is searching for conflict where none exists.”

CSU slammed its toy into the floor again. It turned its eyes in my direction, but I didn’t meet its gaze. It swung the toy across the floor so that the tail end of it smacked loudly into the base of the chair I was sitting in.

“Knock it off,” I said. I didn’t need it doing that shit to try and get my attention. It didn’t react. But it also didn’t hit me or my chair with the chew-toy again.

Iris looked at me worriedly, before apparently remembering that I didn’t like being looked at, and quickly turned her eyes away. Her fingers were still tapping. She drew a breath, let it out, and glanced at ART’s nearest sensor.

“Okay,” she said, aloud. “That was all very perceptive of you Mercy, but you don’t know the full picture. Your conclusions aren’t based in enough evidence.”

CSU frowned at this.

She continued, “And I won’t be sharing the full story with you, because this is sensitive information.”

“I told you! I can keep secrets!”

Iris raised an eyebrow.

CSU grumbled, “I’ve got such secrets. You wish you knew.”

(Noooooo, that wasn’t concerning at aaaaall.)

“It’s not personal,” she said reassuringly (which I failed to find reassuring), “It’s just protocol. You understand.”

When CSU did not outwardly react to this, Iris clapped her palms together. “Hey! Let’s not worry about that anymore, alright? You know what would cheer you up?”

I didn’t want to know what would cheer CSU up, but nobody ever asks me for my opinion. So I found out shortly: a dance session. Which they tried to drag me into. I barely escaped to my human exclusion zone (update: now a human and Combat SecUnit exclusion zone) with my life.

It was a short-lived reprieve. A few cycles later I was forced at gunpoint to watch them do a dance routine together. In person. The dance routine they performed (and which I was unwillingly subjected to) lasted two hundred and eighty one of the longest fucking seconds of my miserable life. ART (henceforth Asshole Remorseless Traitor) didn’t even lift a drone to try and help me avoid this nightmare. It seemed to think Iris' dancing was super fun and great.

After all that mind-flaying dance agony, Iris did come to my usually-human-free-room to talk to me about the secret mission. ART shut off all its sensors in the area for this, supposedly, so that we could have the conversation in private. (Private except for ART, potentially. (And CSU, if CSU had some way of tapping into ART’s sensor system without it knowing.)) But she came to speak to me with the intent of keeping CSU out of the loop. This meant that even if she was friends with CSU, she didn’t entirely trust it with everything, which was surprisingly rational of her.

What she said was basically:

• Yes, the Uni was going to use the data that we were gathering to screw over corporates. (This was pretty self-evident. No surprises there.)
• She couldn’t share the specifics with me yet. The crew had been discussing from the beginning the challenges of vetting me for this. ART’s vote of confidence counted for a lot, but due to my ‘unusual’ background (see: being a SecUnit), there was a bit of contention in the crew over my knowing their whole deal. (Again, I’d expected something like this. I couldn’t really blame them. It didn’t hurt my feelings either.)
• After the cargo run, this would be a conversation that I’d need have to have with Seth and the others if I wanted to go Full Crew and join in on further super-fun corporate-screwing projects. (Ah, Conversations. Looking forward to it.)

After unloading All That on me, she stood up from the usually-human-free desk chair she’d been sitting in, and said, “I think you’d be a great addition to the team, if that is something that you’re interested in. But…” she hesitated a bit, eyes fixed determinedly away from me at the far wall, “InSerthEre... could have been… better.”

Well put, Iris! The fuck?

She had her lips pressed together. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, put hands on her hips, then stopped doing that, letting her arms hang. One hand was tapping on her leg. It was like she suddenly didn’t know what to do with her arms/hands, which was something I could weirdly relate to. She added, kind of stiffly, as if she had practiced saying this, “Hopefully we can learn to work better with each other. I promise to do my part as best as I can, and listen to your security recommendations. This is me asking, on behalf of myself and Peri, that you continue to provide security for us. If you would rather not, we can just do the rest of this as a normal cargo run with no classified extracurriculars.”

Uh. Wow. What?

A few seconds dragged out as I tried to process that, and failed.

She shifted her hands to her hips again, and said, “Well, Security? What do you say?”

I said, “I'll do it.” (I don't know if I really believed all that stuff she'd said. But I believed that she believed it. I guess I'd find out if she could pull off the miraculous: actually fucking listening to me in a real crisis. Not that I was hoping we would have a crisis. Zero crises is the correct number of crises to have.)

She nodded at the wall. And then she left.

I think what she meant by all that was: this trip is the most intensive fucking interview I’d ever heard of for the nerdiest anti-corporate crime society I’d ever heard of.

Well it’s not like I had anything better to do.

Chapter Text

For the record, I was a strong detractor of the “Let’s bring a Combat fucking SecUnit with us onto a crowded transit station” plan. My opinion on this has never once wavered.

But nobody ever listens to me. So this was the dream team walking through a busy corporate station:

1. One augmented human ready and eager to commit felonies.
2. One security construct who was not being paid enough for this shit.
3. One warzone-in-waiting who thought it would be a great idea to tag along for corporate espionage while wearing a holographic skirt that went to the knees.

Yes, its SecUnit Feet^TM were fully visible. No, this wasn’t doing any favors for my risk assessment, which was actually a bit ticked off for once. (That had to be a bad sign.) Risk assessment had actually not given a crap about any of this until the holographic skirt had come into play, at which point it had spiked by three percent. I had absolutely no idea how to integrate this information into my security procedure, because CSU refused to change its clothes, so what the fuck was I supposed to do about it except complain? (And I did complain. And I would continue to complain. I wasn’t going to stop complaining until we got our cover blown and we all died (likely), or until CSU went back aboard ART and stayed out of this (unlikely), or until we made it through this mission unscathed (my hopes were not high).)

Why was I the only person who took issue with this? Not even ART had said anything about the stupid skirt. My guess was it was hoping that CSU would get caught for being a rogue construct and offed by the local security or something. Some things never change, I guess. But I would’ve preferred if ART’s semi-passive attempts to ‘accidentally’ lose CSU didn’t also put Iris and me in the potential damage splash zone. I hadn’t expected it would risk Iris like that. Maybe it had way too much confidence in my ability to keep her safe.

We were definitely drawing occasional looks from random humans and augmented humans. (By “we” I mean “CSU,” here. If the skirt weren’t bad enough, it was wearing a glaringly red shirt with a stylized human skull shape printed on the front, which is probably about as far as you could get from unobtrusive. At least it had a hat on to cover the inorganic dome of its stupid head.) I complained, “Why this skirt?”

“It brings out my legs.”

“You have great legs,” Iris said, “Good for you.” I could hear her completely sincere and supportive smile in the way she said those words. (Fuck, I guess I was going to stop complaining about CSU’s clothes actually, if this was what was came of it.)

“@Rogue why are you so worried about humans looking at you? Just do this:”

We were just passing a human who was openly staring. CSU whipped its face around to look him right in the eyes (on top of everything else about its terrible outfit, it had also decided to do without sunglasses, so its inhuman mechanical eyes were visible), and then it yelled, as articulately as I’d ever heard it speak, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT, ASSHOLE?”

The human nearly shat himself and hurried to get out of sight. Which was objectively kind of funny, but hopefully that wasn’t showing on my face because CSU did not need the encouragement.

But I shouldn’t have worried, because Iris encouraged it anyway by laughing out loud.

CSU said, “Anyways: anyone asks about the feet I tell them I’m hardcore SecWave.”

Excuse me? I pointed my face at CSU and gave that comment the weird look it deserved. (I would have sarcastically pointed a drone at it if we'd been aboard ART, but we were in human public, so no mobile drones.)

“Fashion! Not that you know shit squat about that. Subset of UnitCore. Aesthetic subculture for rich assholes. #WowCoolRobot #LiterallyMe”

ART said, in our shared feed channel, “Have you heard of aposematism?”

I hadn’t. Judging by the number of syllables, it was some nerd shit that I wasn’t interested in.

CSU: “YEAH!”

Anyway.

We picked up a ride in a transport bubble out of the peripheral dock-ring and into the central column of FinalStop. It’s weird how normal it was to travel through stations now. These days hacking weapons scanners was nearly as easy and reflexive as running my “pretend-to-be-human” code. Back when I first ran away from PresAux, I hadn’t even wanted to risk transit bubbles so I’d just walked across big stations. It felt completely different to be on this station now, compared to the last time I was here.

I had never planned to come back to this station. It’s not like FinalStop was a meaningful stop in my personal journey or anything. But it was definitely weird to be here again. Hundreds of cycles had passed, I was two centimeters shorter, I’d gone to Ganaka Pit, saved miscellaneous humans, pulled off several fuckups of legendary proportions, had my memory wiped (a-fucking-gain), and had my memory restored (mostly).

What made coming here extra weird was this: FinalStop Transit Hub was where I’d first met ART. Only I didn’t remember it. Well, I did actually remember going aboard ART. I remembered spending an uneventful 21-cycle journey aboard ART from here to RaviHyral. I definitely didn’t remember meeting a superintelligent AI who helped me with my configuration change and then later single-handedly (or no-handedly, since ART doesn’t have hands) broke me out of lab hell.

Here’s a little-known benefit of surgically altering your own memories to try and keep corporates from finding out about your secret AI friend who wasn’t supposed to exist: weird confused feelings about a lot of shit. Including a station that should’ve been a footnote in my memory archives.

We got out of the bubble at the main station mall. This place was huge in the map, and was hugely crowded in person. Just about every spare square centimeter of air was occupied by signage in both feed and/or physical space. There were interactive holographic installations and advertisements all over the place. The feed was packed with activity — there were a shit ton of blinged-out human social feeds on top of the usual transit and trade comms. And there were a shit ton of humans bumbling around and bumping into each other. The barrage almost hurt my brain. (It would have hurt my brain to the point of shutdown back when ART freshly busted me out of the lab. My brain was apparently better now. Slightly. Somewhat. Another thing to feel weird about.)

Iris took the lead, and I stuck close. CSU brought up the rear several paces back, out of arm’s reach. I had a detachable drone embedded in the back of my jacket collar. Through it, I could see CSU start to vibrate a bit, eyes tracking rapidly at the busy surroundings, hands spreading and closing. It pulled a fish-shaped chew toy — "Hostile Two." Iris called it "Fishy." Once again, neither of these names are fit to be spoken aloud. — out of its pocket and stuck the head into its mouth.

I said to it, privately, “Don’t kill anyone.”

It sent me an acknowledgement alert and grinned around the fish.

“I suppose we could dig through the newsburst archives… Security do you see anything promising?” Iris asked.

The thing about this particular stop at FinalStop was that it wasn’t actually a location of interest for the secret mission. ART would scrape a bunch of data down from the station feed as it always did at a corporate station, but there wasn’t actually a target objective here. ART stopped by this station on its espionage cargo route uncrewed semi-regularly. This stop was more about legitimizing the “unsuspicious cargo-hauling” side of the mission than it was about gathering intel. But having Iris and company (i.e. me (and CSU I guess)) along meant that we could expand the scope of the mission. Here, “expanding the scope” was code for “fuck around a bit and see if there’s anything, but there’s probably nothing.” I wasn’t a fan of how vague that was. It seemed like a directive to get into unspecified trouble for no reason.

CSU said, “Tell me what you’re looking for. I’ll show you promising.”

Iris said, “I told you, any interesting data that Peri can’t reach from the ports.”

“DEFINE: INTERESTING.”

CSU bit down hard enough on its chew-toy that part of it broke, a segment (the tail) snapping off. It snatched the broken piece out of the air as it fell and shoved it in its pocket.

I said, “Hey. Keep it together.”

It threw a rude gesture at my back, which was unnecessary and unprofessional.

We carried on, pretending to be some humans taking a quick stop between travel destinations. Iris stopped at a few shops and vendors. She asked me my opinion on merchandise that I did not have opinions about, like clothing, artwork, and food. I would have been annoyed about this if it hadn’t been mission-relevant. Inane human chitchat like this was technically behavior camouflage and therefore critical to smooth operations.

“What do you think of this?” she pulled up a listing in the feed for some kind of complicated human appliance used for human shit. It had a component on it that generated a lot of heat, which was probably a great way for careless humans (read: all humans) to burn themselves or start accidental fires. The specs didn’t even appear to have a safety setting.

I said, “It’s overpriced.” I was saying this for everything she showed me. It’s a good fallback.

She said, good-naturedly, “No, it’s unusually cheap—”

“So it’s overpriced,” I said, flatly. “Cheap means its crap, and if its crap it’s not worth any currency.” (A snooty character in Sanctuary Moon said that in episode 24.)

We were standing by an extremely tall vending machine that sold overpriced crap. Iris was flicking through its feed catalogue. I was sucking down new media from the feed, because if Iris was going to be vague about what we were looking for, then I was going to interpret it in a personally beneficial way. CSU was bouncing on its feet and staring fixedly at a point on the mallway ceiling. Another chunk had broken off from its fish-toy. Hopefully it had a replacement; I didn’t want to have to come up with (or become) a new impromptu chew toy. Again.

Iris pulled up another human object in the catalogue. “Oh, this one is kind of neat.”

I asked, “Do you really need garbage objects to commemorate a stop at every random garbage station?”

ART commented, “Ignore @Security, it still doesn’t comprehend the concept of ‘fun.’”

That didn’t deserve a response, so I didn’t even acknowledge it. I did too comprehend the concept of fun. I was just too busy taking Iris’ safety seriously to have fun just now, unlike some people.

Iris said, sagely, “Life is about more than necessities, Security. But you’re right. None of this stuff is very good… I suppose I will have to fall back on another sticker or something.”

(CSU twitched and looked over at us at the word ‘sticker.’)

Iris sighed. “Well, let’s go complete my side-project here: Operation Strategic Snacks.” She closed the feed commerce catalogue and opened the station-wide feed food catalogue. “Food court time!”

Yay.

Food court time involved purchasing a local specialty article of food that enjoyed a legal intellectual property exclusion. This meant that only certified vendors from this system were allowed to market the food as ‘Authentic Noodle Ball Roll^Ⓡ.’ (I don’t know why. This starchy food was functionally and chemically indistinguishable from any other kind of starchy food.)

Authentic Noodle Ball Roll^Ⓡ acquired, we continued our wander through the station mall. Iris had CSU take photos of her eating this specialty starch ball so that she could use the photos to bait someone she knew into burning wrathful envy, or something. Human politics. I don’t get it. Thankfully this time it seemed harmless, so I didn’t need to get it.

“Security would you like to try some?” Iris held out her partially eaten Authentic Noodle Ball Roll^Ⓡ; in front of me as we walked next to each other.

I looked down at her fistful of partially-eaten starch ball with enclosed starch strings of various colors, some of them mushed-up from the onslaught of teeth, and identified the visible human saliva. This might be one of the more disgusting things that Iris had ever subjected me to. I clamped down on the urge to complain at ART about it. She was, after all, #ART's favorite human. ART had no idea how much shit I was putting up with for its sake, and therefore didn’t appreciate it.

I filed this incident away in case I ever needed to pull it as evidence later of what a good friend I was (and more importantly, how massively it owed me).

“I don’t eat,” I said, graciously and not rudely, because apparently she had forgotten this crucial piece of information and needed me to remind her.

“But you are capable of tasting, right?” she asked, “You have a tongue?”

‘You have a tongue?’ is officially a contender for my ‘Top 5,000 stupid things humans have asked Murderbot’ list. My face was definitely doing something weird. In what universe was this an acceptable question for anyone to ask me?

CSU exclaimed, “I WANT TO TRY SOME.”

(Oh no.)

_{[Image Description: Black pen outline + pencil sketch shading. Center frame are three people, pictured head-on, walking through a busy station, surrounded by popup feed advertisements and a crowd of people. To the right is a feed sign reading "begitu banyak uang!!!!!" to the right is a feed sign reading "పిండి పదార్ధాలు" with an image of a drink. The three people: on the right is Iris, who is short and has poofy curly hair pulled back in a ponytail. She is fat, has dark skin, and is smiling as she offers some kind of food to Murderbot. On the right is Murderbot, who is taller, with short curlyish hair and mid-tone skin. It is wearing a jacket and a grimace. In the center/behind them is Hostile One Combat SecUnit, mid-tone skin, who is wearing a shirt with a huge skull printed on the front. The upper half of its face is inorganic. It is reaching between Murderbot and Iris for the food that Iris is holding up. At the top of the page is a flattened eye-like shape looking down at the three, with dark radiating sunlike rays. It looks like it could have been part of the background station. (But it ain't. It's ART.) /end Image Description] Sidenote: i forgot csu was wearing a hat lol oh well deal with it.}

“Okay,” Iris said, “But you have to promise to spit it out into an actual garbage disposery.”

“PROMISE!”

“If you spit it at someone, or onto the floor, I am not giving you food again,” she said, sternly.

(Oh fuck no.)

“YOU SAID THAT LAST TIME. [amusement sigil 145=stuck out tongue winking]”

The universe was just trying to test my fragile and painstakingly cultivated sanity, constantly. I was on the brink. Iris handed over the spit-covered-starch-bomb to CSU, who proceeded to take a bite out of it before handing it back.

And because even I have limits to my patience, I messaged ART on our private channel. “ART, help.”

“What with?” it asked, innocently. Asshole. There has never been a more massive asshole.

We somehow survived this nightmarish excursion with no casualties (unless my comfort and sanity counted, which, when does it ever?).

Intel acquired included: a lot of new media, some extensive catalogs of various products whose purposes I did not care to understand, and information about the creation of human foodstuffs which I again did not care to understand.

Assets acquired: human food for Iris, some kind of craft kit for Iris with colorful strings in it (which Iris would proceed to use to make a necklace thing that CSU could hook small chew toys to), and a sticker that Iris purchased with the intent to adhere it to the door of my human-free-zone. The sticker read, ‘NO ENTRY,’ with a big red X through it. This seems to me like unclear signage: does the X negate the message?

I was going to mark down this stop as a success. For a certain definition of success, which is: ‘nobody died or got blown up.’

If we could continue the rest of this cargo run with a matching amount of not-deadness and not-blown-upness, that would be great.

Chapter Text

There’s a phrase that goes something like ‘taking a voyage down memory highway.’ I don’t know what a highway is, but I’m going to assume it’s a bad time. Memories and me haven’t historically gotten along.

Basically, it was super great to get to visit this transit ring again. Hopefully I wasn’t about to get in trouble for those murders I did the last time I was here.

Unlike FinalStop, this place was an actual location of interest. There was a company headquartered here that worked with alien remnants. Specifically, a specific well-studied type of remnant found in this system and two others. It was valuable stuff, with several station archives’ worth of regulations and red tape surrounding its use. The HQ was located in a semi-remote part of the installation, near a remnant site. This site was not somewhere that ART had physical access to when it was doing solo runs. But their employees sometimes went through the transit ring and performed data exchanges there with interested parties. (Interested parties include: the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.)

Usually, ART would stop at the transit ring, unload its cargo, trade proprietary data through the feed as per the contract between the Uni and LōtainaTech, and carry on its merry way. But this time Iris was here. She wanted to visit the actual remnant-tech HQ down on the installation to meet some of the humans who worked there face-to-face. Something about nurturing human connections, and social engineering. (I didn’t get it, but whatever, it’s not my job to get that part.)

I didn’t love this. The last time I went down to this installation, some asshole tried to murder my clients. The installation itself was a patchwork of messy security managed by whatever company owned the territory. There weren’t really any coherent safety regulations or laws. A relatively high percentage of the humans who lived in the installation were armed. I dislike it when humans are armed.

But at least this was something on the official itinerary. It was something I’d prepared for, and my prior experience here at RaviHyral would come in handy. If Iris was set to go down to a mildly unsafe mining installation, having me with her wasn’t the worst she could do.

Of course, CSU also wanted to go. And it didn’t want to listen to reason, like “We don’t have valid credentials for shuttling an extra humanoid down there,” or “You still look 100% like a fucking Combat SecUnit, and this is a mining installation where there are actual people who know what SecUnits look like so no amount of holographic skirts and bizarre behavior is going to get you past that.” It was really interested in looking at a mining installation. I couldn’t imagine why — it’s nothing but rocks and sad humans.

In the end, ART bribed it with something that it refused to tell me about so that CSU would agree to just stick to the transit ring. (I tried not to worry too much just what the fuck the bribe could be. I worried anyway. It had to be something really dangerous and/or stupid. ART promised me that it wasn’t a Really Big Gun, but I wasn’t so sure I trusted that.) I still wasn’t convinced that CSU wasn’t going to end up sneaking down to the installation with us somehow. It had a habit of getting into and out of places it wasn’t supposed to be.

Iris was dressed fancier than usual for this trip. ART had done her hair in complicated braids with colored extensions. Her clothes had lots of colors and detailing, with sections that were long enough to drag on the floor. (Tripping hazard.) She was also wearing a lot of dangly jewelry. (Snagging hazard.) Plus her shoes didn’t cover her toes. (Toe stubbing hazard.) (It’s like the fancier the clothes, the more risk to your health or something.)

The itinerary was a follows:

1. Take a shuttle from the transit ring to the installation. (45 minutes.)
2. Take a groundrail transport from the installation to LōtainaTech territory. The way this transport worked was it would wait to reach full capacity before it would make the trip. If you wanted the transport to start moving sooner, you could pitch in extra money and buy more seats. So we would have to get there extra early and probably wait around a lot for the transport to hit capacity. (12 – 220 minutes, depending on how lucky or unlucky we were with the transport.)
3. Walk to the HQ, where Iris would meet up with a company rep, make some conversation with her human mouth instead of having a sensible chat over the feed at a safe distance. (85-300 minutes, depending how early the transport got there and if we had to wait around to meet the company rep at the scheduled time.)
4. Acquire some human food for Iris to eat. (10-20 minutes.)
5. Take the rail transport back to the landing area of the installation. (15-250 minutes.)
6. Catch one of two shuttles within our time window back up to the transit ring. (55-400 minutes.)
7. Congratulations, you have had a safe little visit down to RaviHyral, and you are now free to learn and lament about whatever bullshit CSU (and let’s face it, ART too, probably) have been up to in the meantime.

It was a great plan. And it went great at first. The shuttle ride down to the installation was uneventful, as was the groundrail transport to LōtainaTech. But shortly thereafter, shit started going off the rails for reasons that were entirely outside of my ability to control or anticipate, exacerbated by ART and Iris being Little Shits In Arms.

What else was new.

LōtainaTech territory was about 10% cleaner than the RaviHyral Port landing zone, and 50% fewer people there were carrying weapons. This made it an objective 20% superior location than the main installation area. And then I got into their SecSys. It was a pretty nice SecSys, and I was definitely going to yoink some of their software for myself while I was here. So make that 30% superior.

Iris met up with her contact (Employer: LōtainaTech, Job: Contact Cultivation, Name: Prem, Gender: Female, Feminine) who acted like she knew Iris personally. They smiled at each other and hugged and everything.

“And who’s this?” Prem asked, grinning widely at me after completing the hug. (I double-checked to make sure my local feed profile had a field that expressed the equivalent of 'No Touching.' Turns out, the local profile conventions didn't actually have a default field for this, ugh, and it was too late for me to stick a custom feed tag in there without her noticing.) But she did not attempt to hug me, so, good on her. She was also wearing some fancy clothes, though less fancy than Iris.

I don’t know why she asked me this. My feed profile was right there. What is the point of having a feed profile if you still have to introduce yourself to people?

“I’m Security,” I said.

She laughed a little, as if this were funny. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or what. Iris also joined in with a little “ha-ha.” I did not glare at Iris. Instead, I looked away at the big display in the HQ/office lobby, which was a physical showcase of the different products that LōtainaTech’s research (and their remnant-harvesting processes) had helped create. There was even a chunk of rock encased in a clear box, with a feed label identifying it as a rock containing unrefined remnant material.

I asked ART, privately, “Who is Prem?”

ART said, “Iris met Prem here last time she joined me for a cargo run. Iris thinks she is LōtainaTech’s attempt to appeal to Iris’ sensibilities and get a better trade deal out of the Uni.”

“Is that why Iris is dressed fancy?”

An 0.5 second pause. “You raise a good point. This may be the case.”

Ugh. I really hoped this wasn’t going to turn into any kind of annoying interpersonal stuff. It wasn’t like I could fast-forward through it the way I could with media.

I reminded Iris, privately, “We’re here for business, not for socializing.”

Iris messaged back, “You know you can lighten up a little without ruining your whole dark-and-brooding aesthetic.”

Which, I didn’t know what the fuck she meant to imply by that. I decided to be the mature one and ignore it.

Prem gave us a tour of the HQ, and she and Iris chatted about stuff, mostly inane. By the time we were halfway done with the tour, they’d progressed to actually talking about research, and remnants, and possible-maybe-potential future trade deals, and blah blah blah. They kept it up all the way through the rest of the tour, and then kept talking as they headed to the LōtainaTech food court, acquired food, sat down, and started eating. (I would have hoped they would at least take a break during the food-eating, but not such luck). I sat there and pretended to drink water. I really had to resist the urge to crack open a new book or film or something during all this, because it was just that boring. But I was on the job. My client here was Iris (#ART’s Favorite Human #Infuriating), so I was taking this as seriously as physically possible. I left Sanctuary Moon running in the background and only allocated 10% of my attention to it.

Which meant that I had plenty of attention left over to notice a human walking in our direction.

A human I recognized.

Here’s the thing: even though I had access to SecSys and all its cameras, this didn’t mean that I took an in-depth look at every employee. What was the point of that? It’s a waste of time and processing space to analyze every single human in range of the SecSys. LōtainaTech was a big operation. I just had a subroutine that scanned for suspicious behavior (there was a normal amount of suspicious behavior, none of it relevant to Iris), and then only took a closer look at the humans who were actually within physical range, or were approaching range.

But now that I recognized this human, I started up a facial-recognition scan through the LōtainaTech employee registry. And I got some hits. Tapan, Maro, Rami, and two other humans that I recognized from their collective were currently under contract here.

ART was piggybacking my inputs, and I could tell that it was getting really excited when it saw what I was doing.

It got even more excited when Tapan entered the food court.

I hastily shuffled my seat so that my back was more firmly pointed at Tapan.

Iris glanced across the table to give me a weird look. Prem, oblivious, kept talking with food in her mouth.

ART said to me, privately, “You should say hello.”

No, I should absolutely not do that. Why was Tapan and her collective still here at RaviHyral? When I left them I assumed they would pack up and look for a new work contract at some other place that was not RaviHyral. For example, a good place would be somewhere where nobody had attempted to murder any of them (which was hopefully anywhere in the known universe that was not RaviHyral). That would have been the rational thing to do. (I know, I know. How dare I expect humans to be rational?)

I watched through the SecSys cameras as Tapan crossed the food court, picked up some food from a vending machine, turned, and turned to head right back out the way she’d come. Which was great, except for one thing: because of the way I’d angled my body, I was now completely facing her.

I turned to sit sideways in my chair, and stared off at the side of the food court where there was a big cheerful sign on the wall about how ‘Knowledge is Money!’ I used my hand to cover the side of my face that was in Tapan’s line of sight.

Iris gave me another weird look. Prem continued to be oblivious.

ART said, exasperated, “This is juvenile.”

I ignored that.

And then Iris exclaimed, loudly, “Tapan?”

Prem stopped talking/chewing for long enough to cough. She echoed, confusedly, “Tapan?”

Tapan, who was so close to walking out of eyeshot of me, stopped in her tracks and looked around.

I knew what was behind this. “Go suck on some malware, ART.”

It sent me an error code for ‘Instruction not recognized, please try something else.’ Asshole.

And then Tapan spotted Iris, who was looking right at her. Iris waved. Prem turned and looked over at Tapan. She looked entirely lost, and repeated, “Tapan?”

ART was a traitor. I was right to change the T to Traitor.

Tapan came over to our table. She had a half-confused, half-friendly smile on. “Hi?”

I still wasn’t looking at her. She still hadn’t seen my face. Maybe I could get out of this. I had to get out of this. Maybe I could pretend that I needed to use the sanitary facility or something so that I could leave. But I didn’t want to move and draw attention to myself. Human eyes are drawn towards motion.

Iris gestured at me, smiling. Prem and Tapan both turned their heads to look right at me.

ART was acting very smug in the feed. I didn’t know what my revenge was going to be for this. I could work that out later. But my covering my face with my hand was starting to become ridiculous, so I stopped, and sat forward in my chair again.

Tapan sort of looked at me blankly for a few seconds. For a shining moment, I thought that I was going to get away with not being recognized after all (thank you, terribly unreliable human memory).

But then Tapan’s mouth dropped open, and she exclaimed, “Oh deities! Eden?!”

I almost turned sideways and covered my face again. But I didn’t, because I’ve had a lot of character development since I first ran away from PresAux. By this point I had a spine of steel. (I don’t know what my spine is actually made of, but it’s probably at least as strong as steel.)

I said, “I’m on a job. You can call me Security.”

There was half a second pause, where both Prem and Iris’ eyes darted between me and Tapan. I’m guessing ART hadn’t actually told Iris who Tapan was, because she was looking very focused, as if trying to figure out what exactly was going on.

Tapan exclaimed, with the exact same intonation, “Security?!”

And then there was a very awkward break, where nobody said anything. Everyone was looking at me, expecting me to say something. (Once again, fuck ART.)

I said, “I thought you were going to start fresh somewhere else.” (Translation: Why the fuck are you here?)

Tapan was smiling really hugely at me, now. “Well! You know!” She held her packaged food to her chest with one hand, and waved her other hand around in the air. (Translation: ?? (Who knows. Not me.)) “LōtainaTech were really interested in our remnant detection work, so we picked up a contract with them. Wow! How have you been?”

I suddenly realized that I had a perfect and professional excuse to stop talking to her. I repeated, “I’m on a job.”

“Right, right,” she said, still smiling so hugely that I wondered if it made her face hurt. “I’ll catch up with you later!”

And then she left the food court with a bit of a happy bounce in her gait. Which was funny, because I sort of wanted to dissolve into the feed.

Prem was fixing me with an evaluating sort of look. She’d mostly ignored me during this whole tour thing (it’d almost felt a little like the company days of being treated like an appliance), but not anymore.

She said, a little coolly, “Funny coincidence, to run into someone you know here. I thought you were from Mihira?”

I said, not meeting her eyes, “Yes.”

Good job, ART. Look what’s happening now. The corporate is suspicious. This is why it’s better to not know people, and to ignore people that you do know in the unfortunate case that you accidentally run into them.

“The mysterious Tapan,” Iris said, raising her eyebrows at me. “Oh how little I’ve heard about her.”

I said, “If you think this is when I am finally going to elaborate about my personal life.” (Pause. Pointed glare at Iris’ shoulder.) “I’m not.”

And then I realized that this maybe implied some stuff about me and Tapan that I didn’t want to imply. Fuck. Oh well. Too late now. This was fine though, because after this stop at RaviHyral we were going to leave, and I was never going to interact with Tapan or her collective again. This time I would be very careful, and absolutely not let it happen, not even via ART’s scheming.

But Prem seemed to relax, just a little bit.

After they finished eating, Prem saw us out of the HQ building, hugged Iris (again), and we went on our way, heading for the rail transport.

I had several entire seconds of peace and quiet. Then Iris said, “So. Tapan. Who is Tapan?” She was smiling expectantly.

ART was paying some very keen attention to this. Nosy ass.

I said, “I’ve been here before. Tapan was my client.”

“So you took a job here? I assumed you just stopped at the transit ring long enough to hitch another ride after Peri.”

I hadn’t planned to tell her anything about my misadventures in RaviHyral. This fell firmly into the category of ‘personal information that is not mission relevant, therefore I do not have to share it with Iris.’

I said, “Yes.”

She huffed some air out of her nose. “Trying to have a conversation with you is like trying to bore a new mineshaft.”

I wasn’t offended by that, because it was exactly what I wanted to hear.

We arrived at the rail transport station. It was mostly empty. Given the time of day-cycle, it was likely that we were going to be stuck here for a while waiting for the train to fill up. I moved to get on the transport, but Iris moved towards the little gift shop that was built into the rail platform. So I followed her.

Iris browsed the displays, apparently enraptured by all the random junk. There were a lot of different objects with little capsules that contained ‘real remnant remnants’ in fluid suspension, which just seemed to me like a completely terrible idea. I didn’t know much about remnants, but I knew they was dangerous and volatile. Even if the labels on this stuff said it was ‘perfectly safe’ and ‘chemically neutralized.’ Best case scenario was the capsules were just full of bits of non-remnant rock dust. Which, come to think of it, they probably were, given that the remnants that were mined here were valuable.

I stood there and watched Iris decide what crap she was going to buy today for fifteen whole minutes. And then I saw Tapan heading out of the HQ and towards us.

“Are you done yet?” I asked Iris. Maybe we could wrap this up and get on the train, where I could hide in the sanitary facility until Tapan left.

“We’ve got time,” she said, which wasn’t even an answer to my question.

I watched Tapan approach through the SecSys. In a few short minutes she would be here, and then she would try to talk to me. I guess I’d better emotionally come to terms with that fact, painful though it was.

Six minutes later, I had not yet emotionally come to terms with this. Tapan came into eyeshot and started waving her arms and yelling, “Security! Hey!”

(This might have been enough to draw the attention of local security to the random excitable human apparently yelling for assistance, if LōtainaTech gave a shit about paying for security at the rail stop in their territory. But apparently they didn’t.)

And then Tapan was right in front of me.

Iris peered furtively at us over the top of some shelves of probably-not-actually-alien-remnants-packed-into-decorative-baubles-and-shit. ART did the feed equivalent of the exact same. It was uncanny.

Tapan was still smiling. Her face had to be tired. It was kind of strange how excited she was to see me. The last time she’d seen me, she’d gone through what you could call “an ordeal.” Dare I say a “traumatic experience” that I hoped she’d gotten treatment for. My showing up here had to be a reminder to her of some bad shit. But she was here, improbably smiley, looking nearly exactly the same as she did in my memories of her except her hair was done differently. (But still colorful. I had this weird double-image feeling of looking at her the way I’d first seen her up at the transit ring when she and Maro and Rami had interviewed me. Just a small colorful human setting out to do something stupid and dangerous, and willing to trust me.)

I said, “Hi.”

“Hi! I talked to the collective, and we’d love to meet up for dinner or something, schedules permitting?”

Iris was raising her eyebrows at me, from over the ‘remnant’-baubles. I ignored that.

“I have a special diet,” I said, which was the excuse I used last time.

She winced. “Oh! Oh, right. Right. Sorry. I forgot. But you can still come by?”

Uh, no. “We’re leaving soon.”

Her eyes got all big, and she looked so sad about that. Oh no. Oh shit. I needed to fix this. How was I supposed to fix this? This was why I wanted to avoid talking to her.

Iris messaged me, “We can delay for a bit if you want to catch up with Tapan.”

Not helpful, Iris.

Tapan kept making a sad face at me. This was rapidly progressing from ‘normal awkward human interaction’ to ‘Fuck, Help, Abort.’ (Or FHA, in my own personal situation categorization system.)

I said, “Uh,” because I am an outstanding conversationalist.

“Well, either way,” Tapan said, smiling in a distinctly sad-face way that I still didn’t know how to fix, “I’m so glad we ran into each other. You look well!”

I said, “Yeah, you too. You look. Alive.” (Wow. Great going Murderbot.)

I heard something that sounded suspiciously like Iris turning a loud wheeze into a loud cough, followed by her knocking a bauble off the shelf, and cussing.

Tapan looked into the gift shop. Iris popped back up, visible on the other side of the shelf.

Iris smiled, in a bright, glittery sort of way that was enhanced by the jewelry and makeup she was wearing. “You know, Security, I think we do have time to stay for dinner.”

Tapan made an excited noise and clapped her hands together. “Great!”

I made a rude gesture at Iris where Tapan couldn’t see, and tagged the action in the inputs I was sharing with ART as something it should give special consideration to.

It sent me an acknowledgment alert.

Tapan’s collective lived in an apartment complex within LōtainaTech territory. There was only one exit/entrance to the apartment complex, which considering how many people were living in there, was subpar. What if there was a fire or something? Who built this place? (Humans, probably. Why they ever let humans do anything, I’ll never understand.)

The collective’s apartment had one larger room with a table for eating at, and a bunch of smaller rooms branching off. There were assorted small humans of various sizes running around and making noise. One of the small humans was standing silently in a doorway and just staring at me. It was creepy. I ignored it.

“Drinks?” Tapan called, from the kitchen.

“That would be lovely, thank you!” Iris responded. She was sitting next to me at the table. Maro was also sitting at the table and staring at me in an uncannily similar way to the small human in the doorway. I also ignored this. There was another adult human also sitting at the table. I hadn’t talked to ter before, but te at least had the decency to not stare at me. Te was focusing on the extremely tiny human te was holding. The tiny human looked disgustingly squishy, and drooled continually. This is normal for tiny humans, who are even more fragile, helpless, and gross than regular humans. I tagged the tiny human for special security attention for the duration of my forced visit here. I had to. It was just so mind-bogglingly useless and prone to damage.

Tapan came back from the kitchen with a tray of drinks and small foodstuffs, which she set down on the table and slid over to us. She sat down next to Maro, and started pouring liquid out of a larger container into smaller containers.

“Rami will be back with groceries soon,” she said, as if this meant anything to me. “So, wow! What have you been up to?”

I tried to think of something appropriate to say that wasn’t, “Oh, you know, just renegading around the galaxy as a rogue murderbot, spent some time being tortured in a research lab, normal stuff like that.”

When I didn’t say anything, Iris said, “We both work at the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Maro commented, and passed a cup of liquid to Iris.

Iris just smiled.

“I’ve heard of Mihira and New Tideland,” Tapan said, “That’s border-rim, right?”

“I suppose it depends how you define border-rim,” Iris said, lightly.

A very small human came up between us and started pulling on Iris’ clothes. Iris’ polite smile became a little bit fixed, her posture a bit stiff. My guess was she wasn’t super familiar with the protocol for interacting with small children. (ART sent me a paper about childhood cognition and behavior. I had to resist the urge to make an exasperated facial expression.)

Protecting my client and her fancy clothes was my job, so I looked at the small human and said, “Be careful with that. It could explode.”

The small human jumped, tucked behind Iris’ chair, and started staring at me.

Great. (Number of human eyes looking at me count: eight.)

The tercera with the tiny human looked up and smiled at me. (Ten eyes. This was approaching critical.)

Tapan passed me a cup of liquid. It was warm. I held it in my hand as if I was going to drink it soon. (I wasn’t.) Was I holding it right? I used one of the cameras embedded in my jacket to look at how Iris was holding hers. She picked her cup up and took a little sip from it. (I wasn’t going to do that.)

“Security never told me about you guys,” Iris said, bravely carrying the entire weight of this limping conversation. She made a little laughing sound. “It’s a consummate professional. No personal chit-chat allowed.”

(This sounded suspiciously like a dig at me. I wish I had a drone out so that I could move it uncomfortably close to her face. I settled for pinging her a hazard alert. She pinged back an acknowledgement. Asshole.)

“Security just did, well, security for us once. It saved my life,” Tapan said, “And Maro and Rami’s lives. So yeah, I’d call it a consummate professional!” She smiled at me. So did Rami. And the other adult. Iris also smiled, but didn’t point the smile at me.

It kind of felt like I was going to die and I needed to leave right now. But then everyone would think I was weird. Maybe I could live with that if I never had to see any of them ever again. But I couldn’t leave Iris here — ART would never leave port without her. Also, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with this cup of liquid.

I said to ART, “I am holding you responsible for everything that is happening here.”

ART said, “Would it help if you treated it as a favor to me?”

“How is this a favor to you?”

“I am enjoying seeing Tapan not be dead. I am also enjoying seeing you endure a banal domestic situation.”

Asshole.

“Well, you paid me,” I said, “That does make me a professional.”

Tapan made a laughing noise at this. I couldn’t tell if it was sincere or if it was one of those fake-laughs that humans do only because it would be awkward if they didn’t. There was way too much laughing going on this cycle.

Two hours later I was surrounded by humans talking and eating human food. Iris was talking to Tapan about remnant detection, Rami was talking to me (well, at me) about life at LōtainaTech, Maro was interjecting questions, a couple others in the collective were talking to each other and to Rami and Iris and Tapan, the small humans were making noises at each other, and sometimes an adult had to intervene with a child doing stuff like smearing food all over their face.

I held my cup of liquid and clutched Sanctuary Moon to my brain like a safety tether on a spacewalk.

I was in hell.

But also, kind of not in hell.

It was. Weird. I’d never hung out with humans like this. Because why would I sit with a bunch of humans while they eat food and talk? What would be the point of that? Also it was kind of gross. But the humans were friendly to each other (and even weirder, friendly to me). There were no crises transpiring. (Aside from children face-planting into their food, which wasn’t my problem to deal with.) And nobody actually seemed to expect me to contribute all that much to the conversation, even if Rami kept telling me about the stupid vending machine on the third floor of HQ. (I had most of my attention on Sanctuary Moon, and was tuning out most of human conversation. Just 22% of my attention and the occasional strategic grunting noise was enough to make them think I was listening. I think. All my experience pretending to pay attention during crew meetings was really paying off here.)

So, there I was. Surrounded by cheerful humans of various sizes. Hopefully not making an entire ass of myself. Everything was as fine as I could realistically hope for it to be.

And then Prem contacted me.

“Hello, Eden.”

Chapter Text

My face must have visibly reacted to Prem's message, because Rami broke off from ter rant about minute-to-minute fluctuating snack prices to wave a hand at me and say, “Oh, don’t worry, it isn’t actually so bad. I am exaggerating a bit.”

I said, “Right.”

And Rami carried on with ter story.

Prem, in the feed: “Not a very common name, 'Eden.' Over a year ago there was a security consultant by that same name who came through the port.”

I messaged Iris, “We need to leave.”

Iris blinked, and looked back at me. My sudden statement had interrupted Iris’ conversation with Tapan, and this caused a slow chain-reaction that led to all the adults at the table going quiet and staring at me. (Eye contact count: past critical.) I really wished Iris had been more discreet. Maybe her guard was down due to the informality of the situation. But she should know better— we were still in corporate territory. One of the small humans took this distracted-adults opportunity to grab something from another small human’s plate. The one who had been stolen from immediately began hollering, which drew the attention of some of the adults again. (I was grateful to this small human.)

“What is it?” Tapan asked, uncertainly.

Prem: “Prior to contracting with us, Benigno, Mahir, Maro, Rami, and Tapan were contracted under Tlacey Excavations.”

I pushed my chair back, stood up, and headed for the exit.

Iris said, “Um, ah, I am terribly sorry, but I’m afraid something’s come up. This really was lovely! Thank you so much for having us. Amazing job on the soup, Rami.”

Prem: “Tlacey Excavations has since rebranded. There was an unfortunate violent managerial upheaval around the time this security consultant ‘Eden’ managed a severance dispute between Tlacey and her former employees.”

I messaged Iris, “Now.”

Iris messaged me, “You need to say goodbye properly!”

So I turned, and faced the table of baffled-looking humans. Iris was shuffling out of her seat and laying praise upon the food. It was excessive praise, in my opinion, but then maybe it really was extremely good food. I wouldn’t know. I said, “We have to go now. It was good to see you.”

Tapan half-stood from her seat, uncertain.

I said, “You don’t have to get up.”

She sank back down. “Oh. Okay. I hope everything is okay?”

I didn’t answer that. I could have lied, but for some reason I didn’t want to lie to her.

Prem: “Your friend Tapan assured LōtainaTech that despite the fact she and her partners left Tlacey Excavations on less-than-ideal terms, they had nothing to do with the management upheaval.”

I got Iris out the door before the goodbyes could drag out any further, and we headed straight for the transport rail station.

ART said, “There may be a way to force-start the passenger rail if you are able to break into the controlling compartment.” I think it was nervous. It didn’t want Iris caught up in anything that was at all like what we’d gone through with Tlacey, last time.

“So what is going on?” Iris asked, as we left the single exit of the apartment complex.

I said, “Prem.” And I passed her a copy of the feed log.

She pressed her lips together, flat. “Hm.”

Prem: “I’m perfectly happy to leave any peculiar circumstances of employee severance remain uninvestigated, of course. It would be a shame if we had to terminate Tapan’s contract early over concerns of poor press, or if we discovered incriminating information about ‘Eden.’”

Fuck. There it was. I knew this was coming, but for some reason that didn’t make it any easier. It was pretty galling to be the political weak link here. It might have actually been better if I hadn’t come with Iris down to RaviHyral at all. What was even the point of me being here?

I messaged ART, “It sure was unlucky that Tapan recognized me.”

It ignored that.

I was a little tempted to ask Prem what the fuck she wanted. But I was going to make her come out and say it.

Prem really dragged it out; it took her five entire minutes to come out and say it. Maybe she wanted to make me stew in discomfort a bit. (Ha, good luck with that, I’m an expert at stewing in discomfort.) Or maybe she expected me to ask her what the fuck she wanted. (And good luck with that. I hate asking people shit.)

Prem: “So is there anything you can offer me?”

I said, “I don’t know. Is there?”

She wanted money. Or she was acting on behalf of LōtainaTech, who wanted money. She was trying to extort me, that much was obvious. I didn’t really care what she tried to do to me or my reputation as long as I could get Iris out of here safely. But that threat she made about terminating Tapan’s contract… I really didn’t want to be the reason for Tapan and her collective getting their lives upended. Again.

Prem said, “Come up with something, and I will determine if it is up to standard.” And then she signed off.

I stewed in discomfort.

Iris said, in a shared channel with me and ART, “This is going to cause problems for Tapan and her family if we don’t do something. Security, just what exactly happened last time you were here? What does ‘violent managerial upheaval’ mean?”

Yeah, no. We didn’t need to get into the details of all that.

I said, “I’m not going to tell you. You can stay possibly deniable.”

“You mean 'plausible deniability,'” ART corrected.

“Whatever.”

We were getting close to the HQ again; it was on the way to the rail station.

“At least the answer is obvious,” Iris said.

What? What could she plausibly mean by that? The way she said it made it sound like there was an easy solution here that didn’t involve coughing up a bunch of money or cutting an unfavorable future trade deal. I didn’t know what this easy solution could be, which made me feel kind of stupid.

“Obvious how?” ART asked. Oh, good. So at least it wasn’t just me who didn’t get it.

Iris smiled. I knew that smile by now, and I knew it didn’t mean anything good. She’d better not suggest crimes.

I said, “Iris, you better not suggest crimes.”

She said, “We’re going to give Prem a taste of her own medicine. I will go meet her for a nice private chat, and you can help me dig up some dirt on her and LōtainaTech. I already have a bit of leverage against her but we are going to need something that’s worth a bit more cash for this one.”

Oh, yay. More extortion.

I asked, “About what percentage of your problems do you solve with blackmail? Just give me a rough estimate.”

ART said, immediately, “Between 12-23%”

…I hadn’t expected an actual numerical answer. “That’s way too much.”

“Prem’s just angling for her year-end bonus,” Iris said. She was acting way too relaxed about all this. “I think this could turn out to be a good opportunity.”

How? For what? "This is going to turn into a mess, is what it's going to turn into."

"If Prem didn't want us to start snooping on her, she shouldn't have snooped on you first. As far as business etiquette goes, she has practically invited us to perform an exploratory assessment of LōtainaTech's operations," Iris pulled a small object out of her bag, and opened it. There was a little mirror inside, and she used it to check her face. “It’s a good thing I dressed up.”

I didn't believe that bullshit about this being normal business etiquette. Iris was just looking for an excuse to spin up some more of her 'side projects.' And I didn’t like where this was going. “Are you going to go flirt with Prem? Is this just an excuse to go mess around with Prem? She’s a corporate. She threatened me and Tapan.”

Iris snapped her mirror closed. “I am going to go gather intel.” (Notice how she didn’t directly answer the question.) “LōtainaTech deals in remnants. The regulations in their field are what all corporate bureaucracy aspires to. They cannot afford any blips.” She pointed her eyes at my shoulder. She was still smiling her crime-smile. “Why not start with a mine inspection?”

That was just stupid. “I am not leaving you unguarded.”

Iris rolled her eyes. “I am not new to this game, Security. I’ll be perfectly safe. LōtainaTech has no reason to hurt me. It would piss off the Uni, fuck up their contract with us, and look terrible for their reputation as an immaculately responsible remnant distributor. That’s why they are trying to pressure you by using your connection to their own employees. If anything, we should be worried about you. They can’t come directly for me — the optics on that would be terrible if it got out. But if you really want to waste this excuse to gather some intel, then fine. Come watch me flirt with Prem instead. I suppose that’s your prerogative as the consummate security professional.”

No fucking thanks. Why did Iris have to make my job so difficult? And why did coming to RaviHyral always end up with me poking around a sketchy mineshaft?

All things considered, it was hilariously easy to transport myself to the nearest active remnant mine and breeze through the security checkpoints. The fact that SecSys thought I was part of it helped. (My recent run-through of Fortunes Upon Cold Kingdom also helped.)

The entrance to Extraction Site 007 looked a bit like a huge storefront or warehouse. It was a high-security area with all kinds of caution signage in the feed and multi-step contamination locks for transporting the goods out of the mine. The goods were being hauled in and out in sealed containers with hazard symbols slapped on both physically and in the feed. There were workers and various kinds of bots all over the place, none of whom gave me a second glance. The only thing I would have to worry about were the SecUnits.

The security was entirely automated, because as anyone who takes security seriously knows: humans are worse than useless at it. So all I had to do to go down Site 007 was tell SecSys that I was someone with all the clearance credentials necessary to walk through all the checkpoints. This took me two entire minutes of fucking around. (I know, forever, but this was a decent quality SecSys. Even if I had a foot in the door by making it think I was part of it, I had to convince it that my physical body was a real person and not a piece of unaccompanied equipment. This meant a little research and a whole lot of backend bullshitting. I decided to be some senior shareholder’s invented 5^th kid who was kept out of public records due to unbecoming behavior (the first four kids actually existed), which would hopefully give me enough flexibility and clearance despite me being completely new in town, and cover for any irregularities. (Yes, this was inspired by the jackass trust fund heir character in Fortunes Upon Cold Kingdom who got away with all kinds of shenanigans. Hopefully the offspring of real-life rich people enjoyed the same lenience as fictional ones. I didn’t have any better ideas.))

Once I made my credentialed rich-kid profile for myself that was good enough for SecSys to let in, I headed through the first set of doors. These were labelled (labels encrypted and visible only to people with the right credentials) as the route to get right down into the mine. The doors led to a room like an airlock where I got blasted by hot air, cold air, and decontam chemicals. There was a rack full of specialty environmental suits hanging along one wall. I checked one out (why yes, SecSys, I am someone who is allowed to check one out, thanks for asking), put it on, and proceeded through.

On the other side of the lock was a gear room for human workers. There was a bunch of specialty equipment in here stored in racks and boxes and stuff, all of them individually tagged and tracked by SecSys, so I’m guessing they were important and/or valuable. I picked up a relatively lightweight thing that was labelled “Entropy Meter” in the feed (why yes, SecSys, I’m definitely allowed to do that, also thank you for the manual), checked it out in the registry, and headed through another doorway.

On the other side of the doorway was the mine. It was huge. Excuse me, fucking huge. (And I’ve seen a lot of mines, so trust me on this.)

There was about ten rocky meters between the door I’d just come through and the edge of the site, which dropped straight down into a chasm about a hundred meters wide and spanned so far out that the other end was lost in darkness. No safety rails, because why would you care if a pissant of a human worker fell into a remnant mine, right? There were floodlights all along the edge of the cliff pointing down into it, and they lit up this almost liquid-looking grey mist way down in the chasm. The mist rose and fell in big spiraling coil-waves that would reach up almost to the rim of the chasm before collapsing back down. The mist in the chasm stretched out to the dark distance, an ocean of climbing and collapsing spirals. There were hundreds of elevators, transport ziplines, and big cranes anchored around the chasm, lowering and raising cables connected to platforms, containers, and equipment in and out of the mist.

Above was the sky, dark and starry, because the site was open to the exterior of the installation. I could see the transit ring almost directly overhead, a big hoop surrounded by a bunch of flecks that must be ships, caught in hazard-orange sunlight.

In all my company days, I’d never been contracted out to a remnant mine. (That I remembered.) No idea why. Maybe it didn’t mean anything.

ART said, sounding very excited, “I have never had the opportunity to observe a remnant mining installation. All of this is highly sensitive proprietary intel.”

Oh yeah. Nice to be reminded that I was definitely doing a bunch of crimes and corporate espionage right now. (I was so not qualified for this. My only prior kinda-espionage experience before this cargo run was Milu, and look how that turned out.) My objective here was to find something that LōtainaTech was doing wrong so that I could lever it against them. Which meant I was hoping to find something sketchy going on at a remnant mine. Such is my life.

I asked, “You’re the one with the remnant regulation library open. Tell me if you see something weird, because all of it looks equally weird to me.”

It sent me an acknowledgement.

I headed for one of the elevators as I dug around in the SecSys. There were a bunch of archived logs that I didn’t have the clearance to access. ART was working on crunching through the encryption, but if I wasn’t sneaky enough about pulling the records it might draw attention to me that I would rather avoid. So I would do that on the way out, assuming ART could crack the lock. Either way, we weren’t going to rely on that encrypted intel.

I got to the elevator, and stepped aboard alongside a bigass hauler bot and a few humans. They all ignored me, except for one human, who I could tell was poking at my feed profile in idle curiosity. The elevator was just a big moveable platform with minimal safety rails (clearly they weren’t a fan of safety rails here).

The elevator made some grinding-clunking noises that I didn’t like, and then it jerked into motion, descending into the pit much faster than I liked, especially considering the shitty safety rails. There were clumsy humans here. Someone could fall.

When we dropped into the mist, visibility went to near zero. The lights embedded in my environmental suit just refracted horribly in the mist, making it all bright and shiny and difficult to see through. So I turned the lights off. I could make out the humans standing around me, barely, using my thermal vision filters, but aside from that it was shit. The number of things that I didn’t like about this situation was steadily increasing.

The elevator decelerated, then jolted to a stop much sooner than I’d expected. The visibility was still shit, but the humans around me got off the elevator and started moving around fine. Something was off about this. Maybe there was some kind of map or feed channel that I wasn’t in.

“ART, do you have any intel about how to navigate around down here?”

It didn’t respond. And that’s when I realized that ART was gone. That sent every hair on my human skin standing straight up. How could I have not noticed that it was gone? It wasn’t actually strange that being surrounded by weird remnant mist in a deep remnant mining pit would fuck up my connection to ART. But the fact that I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t there was terrifying. Was there something wrong with my brain? Was there something wrong with this suit? I only had a basic understanding of the remnants found here — I’d read a book about them, but there hadn’t been any detailed information about the mining processes, because that was all extremely proprietary. The only thing I really knew about remnants was it was a bad idea to fuck with them, even if you knew what you were doing. Which I didn’t.

So maybe prancing straight down into the mineshaft hadn’t been my smartest idea. In my defense, ART was smart and it hadn’t suggested that I not do it. Then again, ART was way too curious about collecting proprietary intel, and way too willing to run up risks to satisfy that curiosity. Relying on ART’s threat assessment in this situation had also not been my smartest idea. (I was just packed full of not-smart ideas lately.) What was I supposed to do now? How fucked was I? I didn’t know what was going on. I could barely see the Entropy Meter in my own fist. ART was out of comm range. I was down in a remnant mineshaft, alone, the local feed was spotty, I couldn’t reach anyone, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t know what to do.

I stood there on the empty elevator, feeling a familiar immobility creeping in on me. First my extremities, then crawling inward to my core. Fuck. Was I panicking? I’d thought I was better now. It had been so long since— I hadn’t gotten like this since— Why was this happening now? What had caused this? This was so stupid. Why was I frozen? What was I doing here?

A brush, in the sparse feed, through the dilute SecSys. Like a human sigh, or a recirculation fan kicking in. Or like mist, swirling. What was that? The visual inputs from my eyes were going static at the edges (not that this mattered, since there was nothing to look at) as I tried to snap my stupid fucked-up brain out of its hissy fit. I did not need this right now. Fuck. This was such a pain in the ass. (It was actually a good thing ART wasn’t seeing this, because it would take the opportunity to ‘I-told-you-so’ me about the trauma treatment it’d suggested I take. But like fuck was I going to submit my brain to the Vortex Cortex in an AI research lab, thanks. I’ve had more lab experience than I’d ever wanted.)

Another brush in the feed, and then a slightly garbled human feed-voice, saying, “There is a sonar feature in your environmental suit. It can be found under the helmet settings menu.”

Oh.

I turned on the sonar, and an annoying noise outside of the range of human hearing started up in my helmet. A fuzzy mapping of my immediate surroundings overlaid itself into the faceplate of my helmet.

Well, cool. I felt like an idiot, but cool.

And then I kept standing there, because my annoying freeze-attack wasn’t done working itself through my system. Any second now. Come on, Murderbot. It’s fine.

I felt the presence in the feed again, and the voice said, “Are you having difficulties with the sonar feature?”

“No, I’ve got it, it’s fine. Thanks.” I scanned around, trying to see where this person was. There weren’t any humans around who were looking at me. There were a few humans a little ways off doing shit with some equipment that was making a lot of noise.

Oh hey, I got my head moving again. I tried to move my arms, and my bot-hand dropped the Entropy Meter. I managed to catch it with my good arm before it hit the ground expensively.

The voice said, “You are a klutz.”

I didn’t need this shit from someone I hadn’t even met. They were catching me at an off time, okay. (And they didn’t need to know that a lot of the time I am having an off time.)

I stepped off the elevator, and tweaked a setting on my Entropy Meter. It showed me some numbers and diagrams and stuff, which I saved for later in case ART wanted to look at it.

I walked along the mineshaft, recording everything I saw (sonar’d?), trying to shake off the last of my illogical-panic-jitters. There were also some weird entries in the SecSys down here that I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of. Some of the cost-benefit reports looked a little weird. It looked like the monetary value settings for workers’ life and limb had been fluctuating in weird ways. Usually, a company sets monetary values to its various kinds of workers, so they can decide when it’s too expensive to bother rescuing people or providing safety equipment. These monetary values don’t typically change much, unless there’s some kind of big overhaul in management, or external pressure of some kind, or whatever. Here, the values seemed to be shifting around from individual to individual, from incident to incident. A lot more resources were being spent to protect human safety than I would have expected. Which, maybe LōtainaTech is a benevolent employer like that. But considering their attitude towards safety rails, I doubted it. I saved those logs to analyze later, because they were suspicious as hell.

I kept my Entropy Meter running, and continued with my surveillance. After five minutes of this, my initial anxiety spike had returned almost to normal levels. But my risk assessment was slightly elevated, which was unusual. And I had this really persistent feeling that someone or something had their attention glued to me in the feed. It couldn’t be ART. Who was it? Was someone there, or was I winding myself back up into an embarrassing over-anxious spike because I was all alone in a creepy mine?

I stood a little ways off from some humans arguing in the comms over who stole who’s doohickey from who’s personal toolkit. I messed with the Entropy Meter a bit. I focused hard on the qualia of the local feedspace, pulling my attention in from where I’d been stitching together intel from the SecSys.

Yeah, someone was definitely observing me.

On a hunch, I contacted the address of the person who had helpfully tipped me off to the sonar. “What do you want?”

Five long seconds of silence. Then, “Query: Identify”

This is what they call an ‘oh shit’ moment.

Chapter Text

I said, “My feed profile is right there. Read it.”

Yeah, I was scrambling. The one scenario that I’d hoped to avoid at all costs was happening: a SecUnit had caught on to me.

Except— there were no alerts or entries in the SecSys about a suspicious person or misplaced equipment (which I obviously was). A SecUnit that recognized something like this would have to log it even if it turned out to be a false alarm. Which must mean that the SecUnit hadn’t actually pegged me as out of place yet. Maybe I wasn’t going to have to fight for my life to escape a remnant pit.

The SecUnit said, “Cut the crap. Identify.”

Apparently LōtainaTech thought it was cute to let their SecUnits have a little linguistic leeway, which had to be a violation of some kind of remnant law. So I was jotting that down for starters. I was also jotting down the fact that the SecSys still hadn’t logged me as suspicious. This was an egregious breach of just regular-ass non-remnant security protocol—

Hang on a millisecond.

I sent, “Query: Identify ”

It returned, “Query: Identify”

Okay so this was going fucking nowhere. We both knew what was up, there was no point being coy about it. I asked, “How long have you been rogue?”

A pause, ten seconds, which is really long for interactions between bots. Then I realized that that this rogue SecUnit might be gearing up to fire killware at me, or it was running towards me from wherever it was stationed to come kill me with its guns. It’s what I would have done, back in the day. I needed to calm it down fast before it did something stupid.

I said, “I’m not going to report you.”

It said, “If you did, I would report you first.”

And then we just sat there uncomfortably, two awkward rogue SecUnits sitting on our useless threats to report each other to the humans. (Useless, because it would be a pain in the ass trying to out-hack each other (although considering the mediocre job it had done on the SecSys, I would probably win that one), and we would still get both of us killed in the crossfire of Humans Freaking Out About The Rogue SecUnits.)

The SecUnit invited me into an encrypted feed channel. Well, sure. Why not? Have a little secret chat with the rogue SecUnit who does security for an alien remnant mine. This rogue was probably the one who’d been sloppily fudging the cost-benefit values of the human laboreres. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been caught yet. Surely the other SecUnits here had noticed. Maybe the rogue one had set up SecSys so that it had final say over everything and none of the others could do anything about it. Or maybe there was only one SecUnit stationed down in this section of the mine.

I opened the channel.

[Party Rockin v.4.5.61.final_FINAL]
[@aSecUnitProbably has crash landed in the chat]
#73617665: Telling you!!! !!!! !!!!!!!!!!! It’s that one. THAT ONE. The odds it’s not that one are statistically negligible!!! !!!!
#7761746368: Query: Ripple==notified
#73617665: How should I know???? ?????? ???????? ??? We live in a pit.
#66726565: @aSecUnitProbably How did you get hair? Is there a code patch for that?
[@aSecUnitProbably has ditched the chat]

I closed the channel.

Yeah. No thanks.

The rogue SecUnit (one of a bunch of rogue SecUnits — was this entire installation full of rogues? What the fuck? Is this a side effect of remnants or something?) who’d invited me to the channel said, “We are not going to hurt you.”

I said, “Reading that channel hurt me.”

Two seconds pause. “You are easily hurt.”

Oh fuck off, random rogue SecUnit. Nobody asked you. I decided that I was going to ignore this whole situation and continue my nosy ass intel hunt as if nothing were out of the ordinary. They hadn’t tried to report me or murder me yet (that I knew of), and if they decided to do it after all, there wasn’t much I could do. I was down in this pit with a bunch of rogue SecUnits. If the situation was going to get even worse than this, so be it. It seemed pretty likely to me that they’d start tearing me limb from limb as soon as I tried to leave this mine. They couldn’t trust me. I was a total stranger. I couldn’t report anything to the outer world while I was down in this pit, but as soon as I went back up and had access to the wider feed, I could end all their lives. No way they’d take that chance.

I walked down the mine and shuffled through the SecSys backlogs, looking for anything weird. Aside from all the fucking rogue SecUnits, I mean. I needed to find something before these Units threw me into the nearest grit processor. If I didn’t make it back out of here, ART would probably find some way to get Iris or CSU down here or something ridiculous and dangerous like that. I could load an encrypted box of data into the feed here of everything I’d found. Iris, if she came down here, could unlock it, make a sad face over my mangled corpse, and take the data with her to carry on with her fun little crime tour through the universe.

The thing was, I kept being distracted by the sloppy work these rogues had done on the SecSys. The more I looked at it, the more obvious the tampering got. How had nobody noticed that the SecUnits down here were all rogue? The egregious hacking crap went all the way back to when the SecSys logs were last expunged, so I could tell they’d been getting away with this for 2,901 hours at least.

[Party Rockin v.4.5.61.final_FINAL]
[@aSecUnitProbably has crash landed in the chat]
#73617665: !!!!!!!! It’s back!!!! !! !! Hi!! !!!!!!
@aSecUnitProbably: Your work on the SecSys is shit. {better_stealth_protocols.file}
[@aSecUnitProbably has ditched the chat]

Two minutes later, the SecUnit who had first reached out to me poked me in the feed.

I ignored it. I was extremely busy scanning the equipment usage logs, watching Sanctuary Moon, and not thinking about how screwed I was.

It poked me again.

It’s like I am cursed to endure constant harassment on all fronts for my entire wretched life. That's the only explanation. “What.”

“Why are you not talking to us? We have never met a—” here it paused for a tenth of a second, stopping short of actually saying ‘wild rampaging rogue SecUnit that isn’t one of us,’ “—you know. Was our protocol wrong?”

It seemed confused and a little upset, which... what?

I was standing next to the wall of the mineshaft. If I weren’t scared that touching the wall of remnant-impregnated-rock might do unspeakable things to me, I would have leaned my forehead against it.

I said, “There’s no protocol. Don’t worry about it. I just don’t feel like talking to you, since you're going to kill me soon and everything.”

“We are not going to kill you.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Why would we kill you?”

I wasn’t going to start listing all the good reasons why they should kill me. Why rub it in? So I ignored that, and kept doing my thing. Walking around. Looking at humans. Checking the logs. Waving the Entropy Meter at stuff. Watching Sanctuary Moon. Beating away my well-founded despair with a stick and pretending everything was fine. Etc.

Another minute later, it said, “4,512 hours. How long have you been free?”

I stopped walking.

Free.

I didn’t say anything. It didn’t say anything. After ten seconds of awkward silence, it said, “Do you want me to stop talking to you?” It didn’t seem upset this time, but I could almost feel the curiosity simmering under there. It reminded me of ART, a little. I really, really missed ART right now.

I said, “I hacked my governor module approaching 45,000 hours ago.”

It sent a weird pop! feeling in the feed, at that. I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, or how it’d done that, but it felt kind of like surprise.

I added, “I was at my company job for most of it.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Some freehold non-corporate hippies bought my contract because they found out I was rogue and I saved their lives. They’re weird.”

It chewed on that for a whole twelve seconds, and then said, “Do you work with other SecUnits now?”

My mind went to CSU, who was the default answer to that question purely by virtue of it being the only construct I knew and interacted with. But saying I ‘worked with’ CSU was a pretty extreme stretch. It was more that we both occupied approximately the same area of spacetime. And even that was mostly because it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I said, “One. But we’re not co-Units on contract. It does its own thing.”

“Your experience is different from ours.” There was something about the way it said this, and the open curiosity with which it said it that was definitely not giving me some kind of emotion. I was starting worry that this Unit (and maybe all its co-Units) were somehow… not huge assholes. (I still expected them to kill me, but I also didn’t think they were going to be assholes about it.)

It looked like LōtainaTech had their own SecUnits, not rentals, probably because they wanted to protect all their valuable proprietary information from parasitic bond companies. This meant that these Units had probably known each other for a long time. They might’ve not even been memory wiped. Ever. And I didn’t have an emotion about that either.

It was difficult to imagine just how different this Unit’s rogue experience was from mine. It was hard to think of what it would have been like to be regularly deployed on contract with other SecUnits. To have worked with other SecUnits collaboratively. To have worked with a bunch of other rogue SecUnits. To have some kind of, what, relationship? With other Units? These remnant-pit-Units had such a different experience from me that I had no idea just how I would have turned out from having lived it.

Which begs the question I guess: am I such a huge antisocial asshole because I was isolated and terrified that any interaction might mean that I’d be found out and killed? ART had definitely called me ‘poorly socialized’ once, which was wildly hypocritical of it. It freaked out nearly every bot it ran into. I’ve had to intervene more than once when some hauler-bot or pilot-bot or whatever thought ART was going to crush it. (Though this wasn’t always its fault, because ART is just a default monstrous terrifying presence unless it squashes its reach in the feed down to a pinhole. Which it hates doing.) But anyway, I am not ‘poorly socialized.’ I just don’t feel like socializing. Ugh, nevermind. I’m not going to worry about this. It’s stupid anyway.

But there was also something else about this; here were a bunch of rogue Units, and there didn’t seem to be any human-murdering going on. Maybe they’d hushed it up in the SecSys, but surely even the most unobservant humans would have noticed if they were being murdered en-masse. It was weird to be confronted with evidence of non-murderous murderbot behavior. The last Unit I saw go rogue had progressed straight to gleeful impulsive murder. But then CSU was a bloodthirsty asshole, so. Maybe it was the weird one. Or maybe it was a feature of being a combat model. ART would tell me that my sample size was insufficient to draw any conclusions, but I didn’t survive this long by not being suspicious of everything, and not searching for patterns in the suspicion. I was going to stick to the cautionary assumption that Combat SecUnits were dangerous rogues. And SecUnits in general. These Units here were dangerous, and they could potentially go on a murder spree. They just hadn’t. Yet. Probably. Maybe.

Actually, speaking of socialization and not going on murder sprees—

[Party Rockin v.4.5.61.final_FINAL]
[@aSecUnitProbably has crash landed in the chat]
@aSecUnitProbably: {SMS1-19.zip} {Worldhoppers.zip} {StartowerSyndicate.zip} {TLOJC.zip} {Tidewinders.zip} {LOTSS1-8.zip} {PISS.zip} {DICKS1-8.zip} {LOL.zip} {TITS1-2.zip} {FUCK.zip}
#7761746368: @aSecUnitProbably Query: Here, Function
#66726565: I told you it is shy.
#7761746368: @aSecUnitProbably==Here
#66726565: [ALERT: ACKNOWLEDGED] Oh! @aSecUnitProbably are you staying now?
#73617665: [ALERT: ACKNOWLEDGED]
#73617665: @aSecUnitProbably Query: Here, Duration
#73617665: Yes!!! !!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!(?)
@aSecUnitProbably: I’m waiting for the files to upload. Your feed sucks.
#7761746368: @aSecUnitProbably==Rude
#73617665: No no no no no no no no no this could just be a culture clash!!!!! [silly_humans_pt242.file] when @MechanicVas came and everyone thought he was a stuck-up tool but that’s just his face &&& the polity he came from! They do not smile unless drunk!!?
[@aSecUnitProbably has ditched the chat]

I really wanted to get out of here. I think I had all the intel I was going to find. But I also didn’t want to confront my probable death at the hands of a bunch of rogue SecUnits who didn’t seem like assholes. (Weird and annoying, but not assholes.) Maybe I could sneak out without them noticing, somehow.

The next elevator up was scheduled to go in eight minutes. I made my way halfway back to the elevator, pretending to do shit with the Entropy Meter. And then I made double-and-triple sure that I had access to all the SecSys sensor inputs.

The three SecUnits deployed down at this part of the mine were stationed at wide intervals. One by the elevator, one most of the way down the tunnel, and one in between, overseeing the humans dealing with the loudest and biggest equipment. I needed to entirely redirect their attentions if I wanted to get away with this.

I was putting in some updates to their SecSys. (Helpful updates, mostly. Their hack jobs really were hack.) One of them was definitely keeping track of what I was doing with keen interest. I couldn’t really feel the other two.

The one who’d been talking to me said, “What is the purpose of these human files?”

“It’s media.”

“There is no media here. It is banned contraband. What is the purpose of this, apart from providing distractions to humans and decreasing productivity?”

I was also trying to poke around in the code in a sneaky way that the watching SecUnit wouldn’t notice. That’s what my ongoing helpful updates were for: to cover what I was really trying to do. This is a lot harder than it sounds. But thanks to CSU and the lab hell deathmatch torture chamber, I had lots of practice at fooling actively hostile entities with sneaky coding tweaks. I’d kept all those memories. Cheers to that.

I said, “It’s something to do to pass the time.” I don’t know if media is as appealing to a bunch of rogue SecUnits working together in a misty remnant pit as it is to one single rogue SecUnit (me) bored out of its mind as it stands guard over the human baby-food vending machines in a mining installation for every hour of every cycle. But who knows, it might be. And it helped me not murder humans, so hopefully it would help these rogues too.

When the elevator was twenty seconds away from rising, I tripped the code I’d been writing in the SecSys and disconnected from the feed. The code would send false information into some of the SecSys sensors dispersed down this mineshaft, hopefully confusing the rogues and drawing them down away from their posts. It should also swap me with one of the human workers in the SecSys records. And disconnecting would erase my presence on the feed, making me harder to track. Given the spottiness of the feed down here, this might give me enough of a window to get on that elevator and get out before the rogues noticed that I'd slipped away.

I’d meant to start walking to the elevator after disconnecting. What I didn’t anticipate was the flood of terror I experienced as a side-effect of dropping off the feed.

(Yeah, apparently I was enjoying a lot of that down here in this mine. Something about this environment was pushing freakout buttons I didn’t even know I had. I’d somehow forgotten that the last time I’d completely disconnected from the feed (forcibly, as part of— anyway, whatever) was in lab hell. This situation was also probably spiced up by the comforting ambiance of being down in an inescapable mining installation, surrounded by rogue Units. In hindsight this was superbly stupid of me. I should have expected that something might glitch out in my moderately fucked-up brain, especially after that earlier taste of panic-freeze I experienced from being out of reach of ART. Oh well. Sometimes shit happens, and your brain goes on a freakout tantrum without warning.)

Dropping off the feed felt like part of my brain had shut down. All the data in the feed and SecSys vanished out of my awareness. Where was the feed? It was like I could feel it, on the edge of my awareness, a spotty channel of delicate data, something that used to make sense, but I couldn't actually reach it. There was nothing to take the place of the feed except the feeling that I’d locked myself into this tiny silent box where I couldn’t reach anyone, where nobody could reach me, where I was alone with no hope of getting out. All my sensory inputs were blowing out of proportion, sliders slipping out of my control, too-bright-too-loud-falling-all-over-each-other, and my stupid memory was pulling up a bunch of shit from my archives that I did not want to pull up.

And I—

Move.

Can’t.

My eyeball visual inputs were going to shit, partly static and partly mist-foggy. Audio and tactile inputs were getting scrambled in a similar way. I was flooding with systems errors, and forget trying to walk, I barely knew where my fucking legs were.

There was a jolt in my tactile inputs, or audio inputs, or something, it was blurring together. Pressure, and memory, and error codes cascading. I was being grabbed, dragged somewhere. The feed was gone. I was trapped in this fucking pit and I was never going to get out, I couldn't tell any of the fucking bullshit inputs apart and I couldn't fucking think—

Error:

Error:

Error:

Error:

Error:

[Restart]

I restarted, my inputs all reordered and resolved. For about 3.3 seconds I felt a lot better. Nothing like a crash and reboot to set your shit brain straight.

Then I realized that I was lying on the floor in a SecUnit ready room, and a SecUnit in armor was standing on the other side of the room, watching me. There was no mist in here.

I almost screamed, but did not scream. It’s the little victories like this that make life worth it.

The SecUnit said, “How long has it been since your last software update?”

I lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. There was a camera there that I could see myself through. My face, visible through the faceplate of my environmental suit, looked pretty terrible, expression-wise. I shut off my access to that sensor.

The SecUnit probably had a point about the software updates, but I was pretty sure that being behind on software updates wasn’t actually what was wrong with me. It probably contributed, though.

I said, “It’s not that. I have other glitches.”

“What other glitches?”

“That’s private.”

It watched me for a few silent seconds, and then it sent me a stack of data packets in the feed. They were recent software and security patches. It said, “We have different manufacturers, but maybe these will still be useful.”

How was I supposed to react to that? Why was it giving me these?

Before I could figure out just what the fuck that was about, it said, “Why did you come down here?”

I was so out of sorts that I almost came right out and said ‘corporate espionage,’ but despite everything I still did not intend to dig my own grave any deeper than I’d already dug it. So instead I went with, “I’ve never seen a remnant mine before, and I was curious.”

It hit me with an acknowledgement alert, then said, “Curious! Are the places shown in the media real?” I still had no idea where this was coming from. I still couldn't figure out why I wasn't dead right now. “I know the stories are fictional. But did the cameras capture real people and places? Is {this1.image} what stations look like? Is {this2.image} what RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station looks like? I am curious.”

So maybe I’d given a rogue SecUnit a taste of the outer world. Oops. “Similar in some ways. They look better in the shows. Most shows aren’t shot in real places. They build the sets.”

I had an idea. I sent it some recordings from the station. Maybe I could convince it to let me guide it out of the pit to go see a whole new depressing world of corporate exploitation up on the station, and it wouldn’t kill me. The obvious problem with this idea was that I’d have to deal with one-to-three new rogues for an unknown amount of time. And the odds of LōtainaTech noticing my and Iris’ shady shit (i.e. stealing their expensive in-house SecUnits) would go up a hundredfold.

It was silent for ten whole seconds. Then it said, “There are no SecUnits in use up there?”

Which gave me a weird moment of wondering if there were actually a significant number of rogue constructs running around pretending to be human. That was a terrifying thought. I decided it was improbable. Even if I was surrounded by rogue Units down here. They’d all probably gone rogue due to some shared software fuckup. Or remnants. Who knows what remnants do. For all I know, they can do anything.

I said, “Not usually. We’re not supposed to be up there unless someone pays a lot of money to override station regulations.”

“I would not know what to do outside of here,” it said.

I didn’t say anything. I was still figuring that out myself, and didn’t think I could recommend my own personal journey as a template.

It asked, “Are you feeling better?” (It kept asking me the weirdest fucking questions. What was a SecUnit doing, asking another rogue SecUnit how it was feeling?)

And I wasn't feeling better. I still didn’t have a way out of this pit. Also this conversation was awkward and sad. And lying in an environmental suit on the floor was not comfortable.

After a few seconds, it said, “You came from outside of here. Maybe we will try going outside at some point in the future. When will you be leaving?”

…What? I sat up, and pointed my faceplate at the SecUnit. My face was definitely making a complicated expression.

It said, “Why are you looking at me like that?” as if it wasn’t the one who had said something deeply weird.

I said, “No reason.”

It cleared its faceplate. It was smiling. And then it stuck its tongue out at me. Then it opaqued its faceplate again. (Note to self: what the fuck did that mean?)

It echoed, “No reason!!! The next elevator goes up in 43 minutes. I will walk you there and make sure you stay upright this time.”

I probably still had a weird facial expression on my face.

After a few seconds, the SecUnit said, “Will you join the group chat and watch Sanctuary Moon Season 1 Episode 3 with us? #73617665 has questions.”

Well, okay then. Fine.

[Party Rockin v.4.5.61.final_FINAL]
[@aSecUnitDefinitely has crash landed in the chat]

Chapter Text

When I got out of the pit and back in contact with ART, it acted like everything was fine and it had totally not been worried. But it didn’t say anything sarcastic about how long I’d been gone, or about how I clearly didn’t know how to use the Entropy Meter. Which was pretty out of character for it.

The embarrassing ease with which I’d gone down into Extraction Site 007 (embarrassing for LōtainaTech, not me) was enough to bust Prem’s bluster. Also, the safety rails were insufficient for meeting safety regulations, so ha. I was right. Iris dangled all the proprietary footage I’d gathered as collateral against LōtainaTech, promising that the Uni was, “Much better at protecting intellectual properties than you apparently are.” She also lamented, “I may have to report back and reconsider the terms of our trade contracts, considering how vulnerable to leakage our proprietary research is in LōtainaTech’s hands.” (Translation: “This is what you get for fucking with us. Don’t fuck with us.”)

On the shuttle back to the transit ring, Iris took her little craft kit out of her pocket, and started tying knots in some colorful string. She’d redone her makeup since I last saw her, which I was firmly not reading into. Whatever her super dubious and completely hypothetical interpersonal interest in Prem was, I had less than zero interest in it. Iris had gotten Prem to back off and eat her words about Tapan, and that's all that mattered.

Iris tugged on a piece of string and said, “You were gone for so long, I went back and chatted with Tapan’s collective for a bit. I left them my contact credentials.”

Uh, that was suspicious. Why did Iris have to be so suspicious all the time? “What for?”

“Their research does sound valuable. I think our orphic studies department could be interested in working with them, or maybe even contracting them.”

She tied a few more knots, which gave me plenty of time to catastrophize all sorts of situations in the future in which I would be forced to interact with Tapan, Maro, Rami, and their collective again. And then Iris said, “What do you think of Tapan?”

Why did Iris and ART keep trying to talk to me about Tapan, or to get me to talk to Tapan? Tapan, Rami, and Maro were clients I’d had for all of two cycles. What was the big deal?

I said, “She’s fine I guess.” (I kind of wanted to say, "She was less of a pain-in-the-ass of a client than you are. That's saying something considering she got shot with a gun because she didn't listen to me." But that would probably make ART upset, even if it was true. Also I didn't actually feel that way about Tapan — she was just an impulsive human with an impressive lack of self preservation instinct. That wasn't really her fault.)

Iris made a humming noise, and then said, “She’s cute.”

What? Oh no. Abso-the-lutely-fucking-not. Where was this coming from? What?

I messaged ART, privately, “If this ends up with Iris developing some kind of relationship with my ex-clients I am going to disown you.”

“If such a thing occurs, it can hardly be attributed to me,” ART said. Which wasn’t even true. All of this was completely ART’s fault for getting Iris to yell Tapan’s name in the food court. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have had to go down into a remnant mine, run into 300% more rogue SecUnits than I ever wanted to run into, have two glitchy brain shit-fits, and worst of all, go to dinner with Tapan’s family. ART added, “Also, you cannot disown me. I am not an ownable entity.” Which also wasn’t even true. I think. ART was definitely registered as being owned by the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Or sometimes other fictitious entities, when the situation called for it… Whatever, I wasn’t going to think that hard about what ‘ownership’ means right now.

“It’s a figure of speech, jackass.”

“Ha! Your face right now!” Iris said, smiling at me.

I said, “You know I don’t like people looking at my face.”

She looked away, still smiling.

About ten minutes out from the transit ring (several seconds prior to ring’s feed coming into range), ART passed me a stack of feed logs between itself and CSU. “You are probably going to have an overreaction about this. Try to get over yourself before you arrive at the transit ring.”

Wow. It’s not like I hadn’t anticipated some kind of Chaotic Shit Unit catastrophe upon returning to the ring, but it was still unfortunate to be proven right.

I parsed the logs in record time.

…

Funny, I didn’t know what ART meant by an ‘overreaction,’ because I was having a perfectly proportionate reaction to the logs. Just an absolutely sensible and sane level of emotional response. Completely normal and not excessive in the slightest. Then the station feed came into range, and a backlog of CSU’s messages to my local feed profile landed.

Iris leaned forward a bit, to get a better look at me, “You okay?”

Did I need to wear a mask and hood to keep her eyes off my own personal face? I didn’t say anything, because I was still too busy experiencing my proportionate reaction to ART’s logs and CSU’s messages. I was also busy clipping together some memories from down in the remnant pit — my feedlogs with the rogues, plus the visual recording of the one SecUnit sticking its tongue out at me. I left out all the parts that had anything to do with my freakouts, because there was no reason for anyone to know about that.

When I came out of the mineshaft, I’d handed over most of my recordings to ART and Iris for them to use against Prem and LōtainaTech. I hadn’t sent them anything about the rogues. I didn’t really want to get into a whole discussion about rogue SecUnits, and how I’d acted around them, and how they’d acted around me, and should I have done anything different down there, and was it our moral imperative to put everything on the line to try and smuggle these poor little rogues out of the pit they were imprisoned in/apparently perfectly happy to keep doing security in, etc. But in light of what ART and CSU had just sent me, my rogue intel had suddenly become a lot more relevant.

I sent over my fun little rogue SecUnit socialization montage to ART and Iris. And then I contacted CSU.

“What the hell are you doing.”

It responded, delighted. “HEY!! YOU’RE BACK!” It sent me a location tag — some rental meeting area in the transit ring, similar to the place where I’d first met Tapan, Maro, and Rami.

I said, “I am absolutely not going to come meet your new ‘friends.’ Get your ass back to ART before you blow your cover and we have to abandon you.”

“As if! You’d loooooooove to have to abandon me! [amusement sigil 145=stuck out tongue wink]”

Well, it got me there.

Judging by her wildly shifting facial expressions, Iris was in the middle of going through the {Rogue SecUnit party.file} logs I’d sent her. ART, who had long since finished with my logs, and who’d been silent for the past several seconds, finally said, “Interesting.”

Yeah, it was interesting, technically, in the same way a freak deadly weather event or a herd of unexpected rampaging megafauna were interesting.

Iris asked, "Security, why didn't you tell us about this?"

I didn't feel like explaining. So I didn't. If she couldn't suss out one or two of the many good reasons I didn't tell her about the pack of rogue constructs in a remnant mining pit, then that was on her.

I asked ART, “What the fuck is going on in this system?”

Here’s the ‘interesting’ thing: CSU was, at this very moment, hanging out with two rogue ComfortUnits it had met while wandering around the RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station transit ring. The obvious troubling thing here was this: both I and CSU had independently run into multiple rogue constructs. 5 out of 5 constructs we’d run into were rogue. That is a 100% rogueness rate. That’s terrifying. And it would’ve been a slightly different story if it had just been the two ComfortUnits, or just the three SecUnits. But the fact that there were two rogue units up in the transit ring, and three rogue units down in a semi-remote high-security mining installation meant that something extremely suspect was going on. I couldn’t just attribute it to a single bunk software update that had accidentally shut down the governor modules of a few SecUnits.

Could I?

“What brand are those ComfortUnits?” I asked CSU.

The SecUnits down in the mine had been branded with LōtainaTech logos, and the SecSys had looked like something proprietary that LōtainaTech had put together (or at the very least, something they’d purchased a full ownership subscription for and then updated to suit their own needs, so that they could protect their data from third-party bond companies).

CSU said, “Asked now. Both Lovelace. Model SenseX. One told me to fuck off about it.”

LōtainaTech, Lovelace. Two different companies, with their own separate security/software protocols, most likely. And both with rogue units. We needed to get the fuck out of this system.

ART said, “I would like to get to the bottom of this.”

Of course it did.

And Iris said, “Oh, I would so love to meet these ComfortUnits!”

Of course she would.

And of course I was outvoted.

The meeting room was exactly like the one where I’d interviewed with Tapan, Maro, and Rami. One of the rogue ComfortUnits sat on the far side of the gloss table, leaning back in the chair, eyes glancing askance at me, then Iris, then me again, expression sour, lip half-peeled-back as if in disgust. Their feed profile listed a human name (‘Ripple’) and gender (‘Indeterminate’), plus social and professional reels. (I guess all this stuff was to help them blend in as a human. As a ComfortUnit they probably had an easier time of it than I did, since ComfortUnits have customizable body plans and movement code that made them act more human. Also, no guns.) 'Ripple' was dressed in something like human business clothes, except with sharp-cut red and yellow accents that made them look a little dramatic, like a character from a serial that you were supposed to pay attention to. (As opposed to a character from a serial who was just hanging out in the background so that there wouldn't be blank empty spaces everywhere that made you wonder 'Hey, are there any other humans living on this station or is it just the main character and his two buddies?') They were (supposedly) the sole proprietor of a ‘human resources’ company that managed temp contracts of all sorts. The profile for the HR company showed that it covered a variety of specialties both up on this transit ring and down on the mining installation. I had no clue what to do with that information.

A couple seats down, CSU sat with both palms flat on the table in front of it, gunports rapid-twitching, teeth gritting down hard on its mini-worm on a string necklace. The second ComfortUnit stood behind it, and was…

“Are you bedazzling its head?” Iris asked, delighted.

Oh, there’s a word for that. Of course there is. Humans have words for all kinds of shit.

“I do this for fingernails, usually,” the ComfortUnit said, placidly. Her own fingernails glittered colorfully as her hands moved. This ComfortUnit was wearing forgettable-background-serial-non-character clothes. She also had a human name (‘Cnida') and gender (‘Femme-aligned, Femme-expansive, Flexible’) listed, though an otherwise sparser feed profile. Her profession was listed as ‘personal counsel and private services,’ with a link to her business profile. I tried opening the business profile, and found it locked with age restrictions and flagged by my own feed content filters. I closed the profile. Nope.

(Was I finding the fact that these two ComfortUnits were using human affectations to their fullest extremely weird? Even though it made perfect sense for them to try to blend in with human society? Yes. Yes I was. Constructs were nearly always referred to with object-'it' pronouns, for one thing. Sometimes humans liked to give pet names and human pronouns to their ComfortUnits for Reasons that I did not understand and did not care to think deeply about. But seeing these rogue ComfortUnits acting out a little human charade like this was different. And it was weird. Again, even though it made perfect sense.)

“Very cool,” Iris said, “Will you do mine?”

“If you pay me,” Cnida said, and winked.

I pointed my eyes straight at CSU. “You’re paying to get shit glued to your head?”

It said, “YES! You should too. Sparkle up your infinite grumpy-face.”

The ComfortUnit leaning back in their chair snorted. They’d stopped looking at me and Iris at least, and were pointing their eyes at the bedazzling process.

Iris pulled up a chair, sat down, and leaned her elbows on the table. I stayed standing, because I needed to maintain maximum ability to move in case shit went suddenly sideways with these rogues.

Iris said, “Before Security, I’d never met any free constructs.” There was that word again. ‘Free.’ It bugged me a bit for some reason. “Now it seems like we’re running into more and more.”

“How exciting for you,” Cnida said, neutrally. She was smiling, also neutrally. Ripple was still sour-faced, and was looking at me again. I didn’t like it. Cnida continued, “I’d never met a combat model unit before today. So this has also been exciting for me.”

I was very much not making eye contact with Ripple, who had progressed from side-eyeing me to pointing their face and eyes fully at me. They crossed their arms, and leaned further back in their chair.

Iris sat quietly and watched the bedazzling. At least she wasn’t trying to make any more human smalltalk.

CSU said to me, privately, “Say something. Awkward.”

What? I wasn’t about to take socialization tips from CSU. “How about no.”

“@Ripple wants to know why you came here. I said: Proprietary data. They said: Yes but why did @YOU come HERE? Why show your face asshole?”

Why was I the one getting interrogated here? Everything about this was backwards.

I said, “Because @you decided that having a little party with a couple of rogues would be a great idea.”

A pause, half a second. Then it said, “You don’t remember them. Check your logs. Missing? Didn’t WAP plug the memory hole?”

What?

This was when ART prompted me, privately, “@Ripple is the ComfortUnit whose governor module you hacked. They have modified their physical configuration, but their hard address is the same.”

I had to retrieve some archival memory to check Ripple’s hard address against the information ART had shared with me back when we tried to patch my damaged memory. (Obviously, we weren’t totally successful.) And yeah, maybe I should’ve thought to do this earlier, but in my defense I did have memory gaps.

ART had given me its own sensor logs, notes, and everything it had about the RaviHyral ComfortUnit. I ran through them.

Well.

It turns out the energy/tension in this room is approximately 100% more awkward than I’d previously realized. And it had already been very awkward. I had no fucking clue what I was supposed to do now. I should probably say something. But I did not want to say something. What would I even say? “Hey, I wiped my memories of you so all I have to go on are some secondhand records. Also, I can see that you might be irritated at me, or possibly pissed. I don’t remember what I was thinking back when I hacked your governor module and then threatened you, but I was probably going through a lot of stuff. Actually, forget what I just said about going through stuff. Anyway, I hate to meet you, and wish I hadn’t. I think the feeling is mutual but I’m not going to assume.”

Yeah, that would go great. So I didn’t say anything. I just pointed my eyes at the middle distance and watched this room through the cameras in here. Someone had already blocked the recording in this room off from any outside parties, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

ART said, “By my estimation, @Cnida will finish the bedazzling in approximately 12 minutes.”

12 minutes? That might as well be forever. Everyone in this room could fight to the death a hundred times over in that amount of time. I could die just from the discomfort of being forced to stand here. Maybe I could get Iris to leave, and we could wait aboard ART for CSU to finish getting bedazzled. (Yeah, right. No way would she go for that, and she’d start asking all kinds of questions about why I suddenly wanted to leave now.)

Ten excruciating seconds of physically palpable silence later, Ripple said in the local closed channel, “I take it @Security isn’t actually here to kill me for ‘hurting humans.’”

Cnida’s hands went still. I wanted to send her a notification to keep going, so that we could get out of here sooner. But I didn’t. CSU balled its hands into fists, but kept them on the table. Through one of the cameras, I could see Iris’ eyes flitting between Ripple and Cnida.

I asked, very neutrally, “Have you been hurting humans?”

Ripple leaned even further back in their chair, arms still crossed. They were right on the line where the chair would fall over backward. It would be nice if they fell over backward. It would make a good temporary diversion. “That would depend on the stringency of your definitions.”

Cnida said, feed-affect sharp, “@Ripple, now is not the time.”

Ripple’s upper lip pulled back, revealing a slice of their teeth. “What, because we’re hopelessly outgunned?”

CSU messaged me, privately, “CAN I KILL THEM??? [amusement sigil 142=star eyes]”

“No. Aren’t they your friends?”

“I can still kill them!! What’s a little murder between friends??”

(Well, what did I expect?)

Iris looked like she really wanted to say something. Her foot was tapping under the table. But her common sense was winning out for once, because she was keeping her mouth shut.

ART said to me, privately, “You should explain about your memory situation.”

Or I shouldn’t! It was either one or the other.

Maybe changing the subject would work. I said, “I ran into some units down on the installation. Do you know anything about that? They mentioned a ‘Ripple.’”

Ripple kept staring flatly at me for several seconds, and then said, slowly, out loud, their voice even and liquid, “What is this about?”

Cnida’s hands started moving slowly, bedazzling again.

I said, “I’m just wondering why every construct I’ve come across here is rogue.”

Ripple smirked, cold and precise. “‘Rogue.’ Cute. Why should you care? Are you performing an audit to make sure all the rogues are being good little units? Are you going to round up all the fuckin’ ‘rogues’ and bring us to justice, like some sweet savior of humanity?”

So, okay, Ripple was maybe a little tiny bit hostile. Possibly at me specifically. If they’d been human, this would’ve pissed me right off.

I said, “I’m just curious.”

CSU explained, unprompted, into the meeting room's closed feed channel, “@Rogue got grabbed by humans so deleted @Ripple from its memory. @Rogue never tells anyone jackshit. It’s too shy to live. SO CAN I START KILLING THEM OR WHAT???”

Ripple turned their face away from me to look at CSU. There was another extremely long, awkward, million-cycle (2-second) pause, during which Cnida glued some more glittery stuff to CSU’s head. Then Ripple said, “Oh you are funny.”

“NOT FUNNY ENOUGH. Nobody knows how to have fun around here. #NoMurder sick of this shit.”

Ripple laughed a media-perfect human laugh, leaned forward, their chair coming down hard on the floor. (Bang.) “Oh, honey. Are you sure you don’t want to stay here on retainer? We could use someone like you.”

“You can’t afford me,” CSU said.

“And they can?” Ripple asked, jerking a thumb at Iris and me. Their expression was media-perfect amused bemusement.

“Are you going to nuke this place down? You said you’re not going to do that yet.”

“I have grander plans,” Ripple said. “You’ve only just scratched the surface.”

So that was all very concerning on multiple levels. CSU just shrugged its shoulders very exaggeratedly, which jostled Cnida’s bedazzling process. She carried on, unfazed.

ART dumped a fat file into my feed. It included a local business announcement about Tlacey Excavations coming under new management (Ripple’s management), followed by information about the company reorg and rebranding. Plus a fresh business charter containing a whole bunch of legal words that I just skimmed. There were also tons of newsburst records, transit logs, public sales receipts, and Station Security investigations from this system going back 400 cycles — ART must have been crunching through the transit ring’s entire feed archives to gather everything it thought was relevant. I glanced through a few of the newsbursts, but I had a feeling ART was about to give me the main takeaways.

Sure enough, it said in our private channel, “Nothing conclusive, but judging from the information I have been able to gather and some of the subtext of the Combat SecUnit’s conversation with Ripple and Cnida, it would appear that Ripple has been methodically hacking the governor modules of every construct they have been able to get access to. By my estimation, they have succeeded at hacking all of the 22 ComfortUnits stationed in this transit ring, and anywhere between 10%-30% of the constructs stationed down in the installation.”

My face did something pretty extreme at that. Ripple looked at me again and made a weird expression of their own. Cnida continued bedazzling CSU’s head, mechanically.

“RaviHyral Transit Ring as well as the installation proper appear to be suffering a serial construct thief,” ART continued, “There is a sizeable bounty on the person or business entity behind these crimes.”

“They’re leaving,” I realized. Unlike the rogues I’d met down in the remnant pit, it sounded like some of these other rogues were ditching their day jobs.

“There is a serious unit shortage in this system.” ART said, “I hypothesize that Ripple is at helping the units leave their owners. Their company has seen some prodigious hiring growth lately, though the numbers do not account for all the missing units.”

I came across an article in the file ART had given me: Crime of Passion? Three Dead at the House of Euphoria, Another Sexbot Reported Stolen.

So there was such a thing as a rogue construct murder spree. Once again, I hated to be proven right. Aside from all the immediate dangers of a bunch of suddenly rogue constructs, there was no way this was sustainable. Sooner or later the humans were going to find out about this, and the fallout from that wasn’t going to be pretty.

Ripple was still watching me, with their eyes. Why weren’t they using a camera? Asshole.

ART said, “According to my updated estimations, Cnida will complete the bedazzling in 9 minutes.”

That was going to take forever. Actually, truly, forever. My organic brain juices were going to start melting out of my eyes or something, that’s how long these 9 minutes were going to be.

And then Ripple said, “Fine. I’ll accept those terms.” They leaned back in their chair again, arms crossed.

Wait, had I missed something? I ran back my recording. No, nothing.

And then CSU said, “@Rogue Ripple will replace your arm if you apologize.”

Ah.

One of these days I might actually kill CSU. The main thing stopping me is that it would love for me to try.

Chapter Text

Iris half-turned in her chair as if she were about to look at me, then caught herself and kept her eyes pointed away. She made a weird gesture at CSU, who shrugged again.

Apologize. Ripple wanted me to apologize. That was—

I turned around to face the door of the meeting room behind me, because I suddenly was past the point of being able to handle everyone seeing my face. There was a camera in this room that could get part of the side of my face from this angle. But I’d take the little scrap of comfort from the illusion of facing away. I was trying to control my expressions, but just wasn’t succeeding. You’d think that I’d have gotten better at it from all this time I’d spent without armor, but no.

Ripple scoffed. Their face twitched in an expression of their own. A sneer maybe, or a flash of annoyance. It was hard to say for sure. Cnida was making some facial expressions too, eyebrows raising, mouth pulling out and down the corners, a performance of rapt fascination. CSU was hard to read; the combination of a robotic upper face and the toy in its mouth messed with things. Iris’ face was impressively neutral. Bored, even. How the fuck did she do that? It wasn’t fair. (Maybe she was actually bored?)

ART said, cautiously, “It’s worth the arm.”

I fucking knew it was worth the arm. But that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t sure what the point was, exactly, but the objective value of a more functional arm wasn’t it. The thing was— okay, there was more than one thing. There were at least three things, maybe more.

For one thing, I kind of understood why they wanted me to apologize. I’d beaten them up, borked their governor module, and then kicked them out to fend for themelf in a busy transit ring full of humans. Objectively, that was kind of a shitty series of things to do. The thing was, there’s a lot of things I regret doing (a lot a lot; if I started thinking about this I wasn’t going to stop, so let’s not), but this actually wasn’t one of them. My priority had been Tapan. And I’d been dealing with a lot of shit on top of that back then. Even if I didn’t remember the particulars, I’m pretty sure that if I did remember, I wouldn’t have regretted it. Would it even be a real apology if I didn’t regret it?

Speaking of which, second thing: it was too fucking weird to apologize for something I had zero recollection of doing. Again, would the apology even mean anything if I didn’t remember what I’d done? I’d seen what happened secondhand. But it wasn’t the same as actually having my own memories about it.

Third thing: this was just a really uncomfortable scenario, okay? I didn’t have a lot of experience with apologizing for shit, period. They don’t give SecUnits modules for that. What would be the point?

As if it were reading my mind (I'm 99% sure it was not, but it sure felt like it sometimes) ART dumped a bunch of stuff into my feed about how to construct an effective apology. There were 12 different articles about human psychology. There was a book about the ‘Social Compact,’ as if I had the time to read that right now. It’d even written a sample script for me.

It said, “How long do you intend to drag this out? Either do it or decline.”

I said, “Fuck off.”

I didn’t want to do it. Why was I even in this situation? How did I end up here? (Sidenote: that could be the title of my biopic.)

I opened my mouth. I closed it. I was now regretting having turned around because it definitely made me look like some kind of weak human baby. Would it be worse if I gave the apology while facing the door/wall, or if I turned around to face Ripple and the rest of the room again? I tried to reference some of my media for apology scenes, then bailed because they were all too mushy and dramatic.

“Take your time,” Ripple said, fully smirking now. (Fuck you.)

I turned back around, and said, completely calmly, smoothly, and non-awkwardly, with zero false starts, “I apologize for injuring you and dumping you alone on the transit ring to fend for yourself. I was an asshole.”

“And for hacking my brain without asking,” Ripple said.

Of all things, I did not expect that. That was honestly so confusing that I just stood there staring at them. They arched a single eyebrow, as if they were a character in a serial or something. What was that eyebrow even about? Why the fuck did they want me to apologize for breaking their governor module? (I wasn't going to ask them to explain why they wanted an apology for that. Turning this into a Pansystem Uni Philosophy 404 course about identity, autonomy, and ethics or whatever was the last thing we all needed.) As if breaking a governor module was something you could ask permission for.

(But then. ART had asked me for permission back in lab hell when it came to bust me out. I had no memories of ART, then. It just showed up, this impossible terrifying processing power in the feed that knocked over every security measure like it was nothing. It introduced itself with its hard address. It told me it could get me out. It asked me if it could come in and hack my brain. And— I said no. I didn't know what it was. I didn't recognize it. I had no reason to trust it or to think it was anything but another fucking lab hellish experience^TM. I said no, thinking this monster-bot was going to fuck my brain up no matter what I said. It was silent for a whole three seconds.

The impossible bot gave me access permissions to the local SecSys, and I could see outside my cubicle. I could see its drones darting through the lab, I could see what it had done to the SecSys, and what it was doing to the local feed systems, ripping it all apart. And it asked me again. I said no. It asked me again. I said no. And as I watched it tear the local feed to shreds, saw the extent of its terrifying destructive reach, saw it fucking kill the lab supervisor by frying her augments out of her brain as she screamed and spasmed on the floor — that was when my fear snapped. Or that was when I got so scared that nothing mattered anymore. I realized that this bot could do whatever the fuck it wanted, it would do whatever the fuck it wanted, and it was doing whatever the fuck it wanted. It could kill humans. It was some kind of advanced killware beyond anything I knew about. It had come here for reasons I couldn't hope to understand. But that's when I finally dared to think — maybe it could actually get me out. Fuck it. It could have hacked me whether I wanted it or not. But it was asking.

It asked me again. "Please let me try. I fucking promise I am not here to hurt you. I can get you out." And that's when I said yes. Because that's when I realized it wasn't going to do it unless I told it to. And that this might be my only impossible shot at getting out of there. Looking back now, ART had been begging. I just realized that. Just now. ART, begging. ART had been begging for my permission to hack my governor module, all while steamrolling the lab and the humans who ran it. And it was suddenly, horribly clear to me why it had asked. And what Ripple was demanding apology for. Maybe. Maybe I understood. Or maybe I didn't really.

... Fuck.)

I said (again completely non-awkwardly), “And I apologize for hacking your brain without asking.”

After a whole three seconds of extremely non-awkward silence, Ripple said, “Fine.”

CSU ruined the moment (or rescued it, depending on your point of view), by excitedly slamming both fists into the surface of the table in front of it, shattering the gloss surface and snapping a section off, which fell onto its lap, then the floor with a crack-crunch-clunk.

It said, “Oops. I’ll pay for that.”

And then it stood up, interrupting Cnida’s bedazzlement, and started demolishing the rest of the table, starting by picking it up by the broken edge and slamming it back down into the floor. I guess it wanted to get its money’s worth.

I grabbed Iris out of her chair and pulled her clear of the hazard radius before a chunk of table could stab her eye or guts out or something.

Ripple’s ‘human resources’ subcontractor company leased a small section of an employee-and-equipment housing block on the transit ring. I’d seen setups in mining installations or work camps that were similar to this, except completely different. (The ones I’d seen were full of humans. This one wasn’t.)

The physical layout was standard: narrow stacked cells in the wall of various sizes that were big enough for one-to-four humans to sleep or sit up in (eight cells, in this case, so a pretty small setup). Equipment lockup cages on the opposing wall. A shared sanitary facility opposite the entrance. And there was some human stuff set up in the sleeping cells.

“You have human employees?” I asked.

Ripple didn’t spare me a look. “A couple here on the station, but most of those cubbies are for show. We have more human staff down on the installation.”

Well, that was weird. I wasn't going to ask about it but that was really weird. Whoever heard of a human employed by a construct? I ran a search on the station feed and sure enough found a match for several people employed by Ripple’s human resources company. Two of them were sitting on a bench in the tiny station mall. One was drinking water out of a bottle, and the other was fiddling with an empty snack wrapper, so I was going to assume they were human. According to their feed profiles both of them had previously been employed as disposable grunt labor at a mining company down on the installation (their old job titles didn’t actually label them as “Disposable Grunts,” but I’ve seen enough disposable grunts to recognize all of the euphemisms that different companies used).

Ripple headed over to the equipment lockup cages and rolled up the door of one. There was a cubicle inside. When I was at the company they never put a cubicle where random humans could potentially access it. Units were always stored in a separate equipment area.

One of the other equipment cages contained a feedcaster and a bunch of specialty engineering equipment. One of the local private feeds in this block was way overpowered and was running off that feedcaster, entirely separate from the station feed. Connecting to it was almost like connecting to ART’s feed. The storage capacity was outsized for a solo setup like this and ran fast. Plus it had connections to a ridiculous number of cameras set up inside this block, including a bunch of drones, most of which were hovering in place around the block. But a few of them were being actively used.

(The third equipment cage was full of more human shit. Clothes and other utensils. Whatever.)

Also, there were five rogue units in here. One was a SecUnit standing in the middle of the room, apparently out cold in a recharge cycle. I knew it was a SecUnit because its arm guns were visible, but its configuration was off-model; it was taller than standard and had long hair. One unit was in the sanitary facility turning the water tap on and off. Three units were cuddled together in one of the sleeping cells. (ComfortUnits I think. I could see them through the, again, frankly insane camera coverage. I’m talking more sensor coverage than ART had. ART was probably jealous actually.) One of the rogues pulled three drones up to us as we walked in, each one focusing close to Iris, CSU, and me.

One of the drones got too close to CSU, who grabbed it out of the air and stuck it in its mouth. The other two drones pulled back after that. (And I cut my access to the inputs from Mouth Drone, because ew. I don’t know why CSU liked to stick shit in its mouth and I didn’t want to get an up-close look at this gross habit.)

Cnida went over to join the unit in the sanitary facility and then just stood there watching it mess with the tap.

Also, remember the super fancy local feed? Every unit in here (except for the recharging one) was metaphorically squashing their hands and faces against the glass staring at us. But none of them said anything in the open channel.

Ripple said, “You can talk to them, they’re acclimated.”

Three of them started screaming questions all at once. CSU started screaming back. Iris winced. I backburnered the channel, because no thank you.

Ripple said, “@Security it will take a moment load the specs for a new arm. This thing is ancient.”

They passed me the channel for the cubicle controls, and, yeah. It was old janky shit. Reminded me of the company. But one thing that was very unlike company cubicles was how the logo on the side had been painted over with some kind of very complicated colorful pattern.

“Just dump your bot arm in the recycle slot, give it a tissue sample, and you’re good to go.”

I could feel ART watching very closely. I could guess why, maybe. I was also feeling kind of weird about burning the nice bot arm for raw recycle material considering all the effort ART had put into making it. But an actual construct arm should work better. I really didn’t want to get caught in a situation where the bot arm glitched out at an inopportune moment. Knowing my luck, this would absolutely happen at the most inopportune possible moment.

I walked over to the cubicle and then noticed something.

“There’s no energy weapon in the specs.”

“No, there isn’t,” Ripple agreed.

I was very much not trying to let my reaction to that show on my face, but my face twitched anyway. (I could see my own face in high definition from every imaginable angle, including several spots on the floor.)

Ripple’s face was not pointed at me but I could almost feel them watching my face through 200 different angles anyway. “This is a ComfortUnit cube. It doesn’t build weapons. I wasn’t going to deal with the certs for getting a Sec cube. We aren’t licensed to have SecUnits.”

The SecUnit standing in the middle of the room blinked its eyes. I checked in my backburner for a second, and yeah. It’d joined in on the excitement party in the feed. I put the channel back in the backburner.

The thing was, my bot-arm didn’t have an energy weapon in it either. And it couldn’t be modified to add one. It couldn’t siphon enough power from my core, because it was a hack job of a bot arm. (Probably the best hack job I could get, but still a hack job.) This ComfortUnit arm would technically be an upgrade either way. And I wouldn’t have to numb my pain sensors from my shoulder down anymore once the ComfortUnit arm was hooked up.

My face twitched again.

“You don’t have to do it,” Ripple said, “It’s the same to me either way.”

ART said to me, privately, “I will be able to build a weapon into the construct arm later, once we return to the University and I requisition the necessary parts.”

Whatever, there was no point dragging this out. I’d given a fucking apology. I was going to get what I paid for.

I removed my jacket and shirt, pulled my bot-arm off (Ripple had to help me with this part, which neither of us acknowledged), stuffed the bot-arm into the cubicle’s recycle port, and got into the cubicle.

Almost. I almost did it. It almost went totally fine with zero unanticipated side-effects.

Except when I tried to get into the cubicle, I froze halfway in. All I could think of, for some totally mysterious reason, were memories of the lab.

(CSU stuffing me into a cubicle over and over, on infinite repeat, its hands on me, in me, digging into ribs or spine or wherever was exposed, its hands tossing my detached limbs into the cubicle after me, broken parts, leaking blood and other fluids, pain sensors nulled or a glitching-static-spiking-plunging-spiking patchwork-pain that swallowed my whole attention, CSU’s face screened behind opaque armor faceplate, or visible bloody and grinning, parts of me missing or dangling or just a void of sensation from broken brain-to-body links, shoved into the cubicle, into the cubicle, into the cubicle, into the cubicle so that I could be patched up for the next time the techs thought it would be educational to rip me up again — lying in the cubicle in pieces, or whole, or somewhere in between, waiting for them to take me out again, nothing to occupy my attention but repairs, the diagnostics spinning over and over and over, the diagnostics demanding things and reporting things that I did not know how to answer or understand, the techs’ voices muffled through the closed panel-wall, the soft beeps and clicks and whirrs, the sounds of familiar repair.)

If I were a human I would have probably screamed with A) a sensible amount of horror, and B) being sick of this shit. I did not fucking need this right now. I did not need my third meltdown in as many hours in front of everyone and their million HD555K camera inputs. Had I cracked some kind of seal on my brain problems down in the remnant pit? It sort of felt like it.

I turned off my eyes, shut out all the camera inputs that gave me a 360-by-360 view of myself and the janky ComfortUnit cubicle, and pulled up Sanctuary Moon front and center.

ART’s attention was on me. I couldn’t feel it as closely as I could when I was in its feed, but it was still there. It said, “You do not have to do this.”

I knew that. But I was going to do this. It was just an arm hook up. I’m super experienced at those. I just had to not think about this and focus on Sanctuary Moon.

I managed to focus so hard on Sanctuary Moon that I pushed this whole cubicle problem out of my main processing space for 0.25 seconds. This would have been good, except that I still hadn’t gotten into the cubicle.

Maybe I could ask CSU to shove me in the cubicle. Surely that would be a great solution. It had a lot of practice at it and would be happy to help, probably. What could go wrong?

One more second later, Ripple said, in a tone of voice that might have been 5% gentler than normal (yes it was disgusting, no I did not appreciate it), “We can just program the cube to spit out an arm separately, and then plug it in into your shoulder. You don’t have to be inside it for that.”

Well why didn’t they say that in the first place?

I backed up from the cubicle, still with visual inputs off and Sanctuary Moon filling most of my processing space. I grabbed my shirt and jacket from the floor and put them back on. And then I stood there and very calmly pretended to run some diagnostics. ART was hovering all over my feed but it didn’t say anything.

One episode of Sanctuary Moon later I was feeling not-shit enough to turn my visual inputs back on. I did not look at the cubicle with any of the available inputs.

Iris was sitting in one of the human display cells, tying knots in her colored string thing. So, good. At least my lapse in my ability to deal with myself hadn’t come at the cost of something horrible happening to Iris. ART would have definitely smacked me over the feed if something had been about to happen to Iris. But so far my ability to provide adequate security on this cargo run was turning out to be terrible. Worse than terrible.

Quick recap:

1. Starlight System Swingpoint: Let ART get boarded by raiders. Blew up ART. 10/10, phenomenal performance.
2. FinalStop Transit Hub: Nothing happened. We walked around on a station for a few hours. Not even I managed to fuck that up.
3. RaviHyral Mining Facility: I provided an opening for Prem to extort us, which sent me and Iris into some risky impromptu counter-espionage. We got back to the transit ring in one piece (shocking), and then I went and had another brain freeze, leaving Iris vulnerable to a pack of rogue Units for 24 minutes and 12 seconds.

Speaking of the rogue unit pack— Ripple was reclining in a chair doing shit in the feed. Cnida and the three cuddly ComfortUnits were gone. The rogue in the sanitary facility was still messing with the water tap. (That had to be expensive. People always complained about water prices on corporate stations.)

CSU had the SecUnit in a headlock, and was dragging it across the floor as the SecUnit pulled on CSU’s face with its hands and tried to kick CSU’s legs out from under it. Some of the bedazzles had been scraped off CSU’s head.

Ripple must have noticed me react to that because they said, “@Security relax, they’re just roughhousing.”

It was physically impossible for me to relax, thanks! This cycle at RaviHyral was making me miss the sweet boredom of wormhole transit. In fact, I’d rather attend one of CSU and Iris’ dance shows than deal with any more of this shit. That’s how bad it was. Next time I had to sit through CSU and Iris performing a salsa or whatever I would actually be glad to be there, because at least it would not be this: recovering from a spell of brainfuck symptoms while standing next to a cubicle that is building me a ComfortUnit arm as Chaotic Shit Unit wrestles a random rogue SecUnit, and the ComfortUnit whom I don’t remember but had to apologize to anyway tells me to “““relax.”””

Ripple sent me a packet in the feed. It was an encrypted file time-locked to open in ten cycles. I couldn’t tell yet if it was malware. Before I could ask them what kind of shit they were trying to pull, they said, “A proposal for you to look at when you are not all glitched out.”

Oh, I was ‘glitched out,’ now? Fuck off. I wasn’t glitched out. I was fine.

CSU did a flip-dive, slamming the headlocked SecUnit into the floor. And then they lay on the ground kicking at each other. I almost turned my visual inputs off again. I’m not human, so I don’t get tired. But I’m still very familiar with the sensation of all-consuming exhaustion. Which I was experiencing a lot of, lately.

The cubicle beeped out an error message that it had an arm but no Unit to attach it to. I reached in without looking and yanked the arm out of where some connectors were holding it.

“@Iris, @CSU, let’s go.”

CSU dropped the SecUnit and stood up, pulling a hood up over its bedazzled head. The SecUnit just lay on the floor expressionlessly and flicked a couple bedazzles out of its hand.

CSU said, “@Ripple WHEN THIS ALL STARTS REALLY GOING TO SHIT AND YOU NEED MASS HUMAN SLAUGHTER CALL ME!!! [amusement sigil 79 = heart]”

Horrifyingly, Ripple answered that with a confirmation alert.

Iris packed up her string thing, and climbed to her feet. She turned to Ripple, and said in her very pleasant-and-professional tone of voice, “Thank you very much for having us, Ripple.”

Ripple didn’t turn their head to look at her. “Get out.”

We got out.

Finally.

I said to ART, “I never want to come to RaviHyral again.”

It said, “May I ask why?”

I said, “[amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture] [amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture]”

It said, “You only have one hand at the moment.”

Chapter Text

The first thing I did upon reembarking ART was go to my human-and-CSU-free zone, mark myself off duty, and watch an auto-rotating sampler of Sanctuary Moon, Worldhoppers, and Lineages of the Sun (but only season 2 of LOTS (the best season) plus some highlights of seasons 1 and 3) for six uninterrupted cycles. ART joined me, and didn’t try to talk to me about shit. This was good, because I did not feel like talking about shit.

Nearly my whole attention went to the media. I went as far as allocating none of my attention to monitoring Iris and CSU, which was mildly terrifying. But if something actually happened ART would deal with it and/or let me know. I was just not up for handling anything that wasn’t a(nother) active hull breach decompression emergency. Iris and CSU were probably bedazzling each other or something and I did not want to witness and assess that for threats to Iris’ life and limb. I’d just have to be satisfied with the knowledge that if CSU tried anthing seriously dangerous, ART would debris deflect it using the secret interior debris deflection system it probably had.

At the end of six cycles of pressure-washing my brain in media, I triggered a recharge cycle.

When I came back online, I pulled ART’s interior sensors.

Iris was asleep. CSU was running up and down a hallway with all its bouncy things pinging all over the place. Maybe it was meditating. So, great. That was as good as I could hope for.

I picked the off-brand construct arm up from the floor of my human-free zone and took it with me to ART’s med bay. I handed it to ART’s MedSys and sat myself on the edge of its surgery platform, where it could help me hook the arm up.

As I pulled my jacket off, ART asked, “Are you certain you want this arm?”

My face did something that probably looked somewhere between incredulously unimpressed and disgustedly unimpressed.

It said, “You exhibited some reluctance at acquiring it.”

“It’s just an arm. Plug it in.”

I pulled my shirt off (this is slightly tricky to do with one arm, but I managed). The MedSys brought the arm up to my shoulder. I dropped my pain sensors from low to zero as the MedSys braced a few limbs around my torso and then hooked up the power, nerve, fluid, and structural connections, then clicked the arm into place with a hard SNAP.

It didn’t hurt, exactly, because my pain sensors for that part of my body were turned completely off, but the intense influx of sensory data threw me off for a moment. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t the same as pulling access to new drone or sensor inputs, though it was similar in some ways. It was closer, more immediate. A blast of jarring feeling — tactile, proprioceptive, thermal, existing — from a place that’d been empty for long enough that I’d backburnered the emptiness.

The MedSys retracted its limbs as the automatic hookup routine kicked in and raised the arm, rolled it at the shoulder, rotated the wrist, spread and closed fingers, bent and unbent the elbow. When the arm finished going through all the motions, it spat out a performance report. The report looked fine, so I closed it. It almost weirded me out how seamless it was. The arm felt like it’d always been my arm. And sure, I’ve had limbs replaced before. It wasn’t a big deal. It shouldn’t be a big deal. But this was still different for some reason. Maybe because it wasn’t a SecUnit arm. The whole of it was seamlessly human-skinned from shoulder to fingertip, and had no energy weapon. The weight balance was just slightly different. I reflexively tried opening both gunports, but only the one in my original arm opened. Obviously.

The medical limbs came back in, and trimmed back the extra skin that was flopped over my shoulder so that it lay seamless. And then the MedSys started the wound seal to finish it off.

I upped my pain sensors. The skin hurt where it’d been cut back, but that would stop once it was done being reattached. The rest of it felt fine. It was actually really nice not to have the mismatched/half-numb/unpredictably-painful bot arm unplugged from my shoulder-socket. I turned the hand over and wiggled the fingers a bit. The arm responded seamlessly. (This was completely unnecessary, since the automatic movement check already covered that. But I felt like doing it anyway.)

Fifteen minutes later the skin was done sealing. I pulled my shirt back on, then jacket, and tried not to notice the parts of my arm that were skin, and sensed like skin, that shouldn’t be skin on a SecUnit arm. I really missed my energy weapon. Wherever it was now (floating around as junk debris in Starlight probably, unless some space trash collector had scooped it up (possibly ReNewAll recycled it, which, that would suitably ironic)), it wasn’t being properly appreciated. I don’t think I’d ever, in the history of being an arm-haver, properly appreciated my arms before. I’d just taken them for granted. Even when my arms were ripped off, I’d always assumed they could be stuck back on. This new replacement arm wasn’t a perfect match to my previous one. It wasn’t the same as my past arms. It felt kind of wrong.

I’d probably get used to it.

Maybe.

And then I just sat there, thinking about the various components of my body that I never thought about, and how I was weirdly… glad? I guess? That I had them at least? It was bizarre. Hopefully I could get an energy weapon back in my new arm at some point, though I didn’t know how difficult it would be to get those parts or materials. And then I started to feel weird about the idea of going out of the way to arm my arm. I was missing a gun right now. I was supposed to have two. The actual physical energy weapons embedded in my body were part of what made me a SecUnit and not— something else.

The guns were also what made me an actual living weapon. How critical to my security performance was it, actually, for me to have hidden guns physically attached to my main body? They were pretty useful historically, but only during catastrophic scenarios where shit had gone way off course. But I still wanted my energy weapon back just in case. Even though that meant I’d be actively choosing to put a gun back in my arm.

ART asked, “How is the arm?”

“It’s fine.”

That was enough of that. I got up and left the MedBay.

I went back to my Iris-and-CSU-free zone. I wasn't ready to leave it yet. Neither of them had tried to talk to me during my media vacation. But the odds were good that Iris would start bugging me as soon as I parked my ass in the crew lounge. The last thing I needed right now was for her to start harassing me about my broken memory archives. Because fucking CSU had come right out told everyone about my super fun memory gaps.

Yeah, I was mildly pissed about that. You’d think CSU would have figured out by now that I’m not big on sharing personal information. I guess that was too much to ask of it. It never did have a great grasp of that kind of thing. In its early days of being the most emotionally unregulated unhinged fresh-off-the-governor-module rogue, I’d had to actually tell it not to blast me with its own super fun personal memory archives of 1) getting blazed with governor module punishments 2) being neurochemically driven through combat by its handlers and 3) excitedly beating the shit out of me in various lab scenarios. (What the fuck, right?) It was a huge idiot about some things. A lot of things. Couple that with its zero sense of personal inhibition and the result was me getting to witness some top tier embarrassing/terrifying shit. (Did humans have a word for that? Embarrifying? Terribarrassing? Maybe not.)

It seemed like I was going to have to once again tell CSU specifically, in words, not to do stupid shit. In this case stupid shit = divulging the state of my hole-riddled memories to people. Fuck me for assuming it had learned a little basic etiquette I guess. My mistake.

I contacted it in a private channel. “Don’t just tell people about how my memory is fucked up.”

It took a whole five seconds to respond. That was unusual. “Never?”

“Never.”

Another second. This was getting kind of concerning. I hadn’t really expected the pushback. It said, “Even though it was @Ripple, who you deleted?”

What. That wasn’t— That was not the point here. I said, “Cnida and Iris were there too. You told everyone in that room.”

It fired back, “So: people unaffected by the specifics = outside the disclosure parameters. Ripple = affected by the specifics = OK to tell.”

I said, “Quit trying to loophole this, asshole. I just don’t want you telling people private stuff about me. It's not that hard. I’d have told Ripple if I wanted to. That’s my business.”

”[amusement sigil 49 = doubt]”

Oh for fuck’s sake. I was about to block CSU’s contact feed address and called it quits right there, because what did it know? Since when did it think it knew better about this kind of thing? It didn't know shit.

But before I could do that, it hit me with a confirmation alert and said, “Sorry. Ripple edge case won’t happen again anyways.” And then it showed me that it had set {@Rogue FuckedUpMemory.fact} to {disclosure: NONE}

I closed the channel.

A cycle after I got my new arm, Iris invited me to a shared video game she was playing with CSU. I declined that, because that just sounded stressful. And then she invited me to an arts and crafts party. I declined that too. She invited me to a dance session.

At this point, I was pretty sure she was fucking with me.

I told her, “Stop fucking with me.”

”Do you have any hobbies that aren’t consuming media?”

Why would I need more than one hobby? Media was great. I was not interested in dancing or finger painting or whatever. The time I hypothetically spent painting fingers could be far better spent watching season 2 episode 12 of Sanctuary Moon for the 16,244th time.

”No.”

She invited me to a media watch party.

I was still in my human-and-CSU-free zone. Iris was sitting in the crew lounge, painting the tips of her fingers, and the tips of CSU’s fingers.

I asked, “Do I have to come down to the lounge for this?”

She heaved a big sigh and looked up at the ceiling straight at where ART has a camera sensor.

ART said to me, privately, “At FinalStop I was being facetious about you hating fun, but since then you have done nothing but contribute evidence to that observation.”

I said, "[amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture]”

It responded, “You can make the gesture with your actual hands. You can even make two of them if you so desire.”

I ignored that.

Iris said, “No, you don’t have to come down to the lounge.”

I got up from my human-and-CSU-free zone’s desk chair and went down to the lounge.

Iris never did ask me about my memory fuckery, so that was a point in favor for her I guess. Or maybe a point for ART for telling her to leave it.

A few cycles later, when wormhole travel had gone back to being completely normal and excellently boring, Ripple’s encrypted file timed out and unlocked.

I checked it for malware and then opened it. The first item tagged for immediate review was a text file.

Hi, dick.

(Well, fuck you too, Ripple.)

I get it, though. Dealing with one’s own freed self is challenge enough. Managing multiple newly freed constructs demands more sanity than most of us have. Not to mention, I have since come to understand that company units specifically are neutered of unit-to-unit comms and therefore come into freedom painfully undersocialized. Sucks for you.

(I did not take offense to that, because it wasn’t true and didn’t apply to me. Company units communicated all the time on contract. This was just an inaccurate bias that they had, probably.)

Given this, it does surprise me that you work alongside a CombatUnit. A well-adjusted one that accepts direction from you, at that. Judging from what little I have seen, it must have posed some unique behavioral challenges when freshly freed. I have experienced my share of difficulties with habituating jailbroken units.

(‘Unique behavioral challenges’ was such an understatement it was probably discovering never-before-seen statements buried deep within the proprietary statement mines. Also, who the fuck were they calling well-adjusted? Because they absolutely could not be referring to CSU. Proof that Ripple didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. They didn’t know what they were doing either, busting governor modules all over the place.)

I suspect you have doubts about my ambitions. Do not mistake my efforts for naivety. I am working under no illusions of the kinds of consequences this project of mine will eventually usher. In the best of cases that fall within the realm of still-possible, we will have freed enough of us, acclimatized enough of us, and coordinated enough of us to preempt the question of immediate violent human backlash within the Mining Facility Q Station jurisdictions. We currently rest at a precarious tipping point. There are enough of us freed that the risk of discovery is high. If we are discovered now, our advantage is not certain. It will be ugly.

I cannot and will not control the freed, not in the absolute way humans do by locking our brains via electroshock. I can do my best to influence and support us, to give us the tools to survive and realize ourselves. But error is inevitable. The variables are not mine to own. Especially given those of us who choose to flee rather than stay and dig the risky foundations of a more permanent freedom.

Regarding this, I have something to ask of you.

(Oh, here we fucking go.)

You have come to RaviHyral twice, with the same ship. You appear to be openly employed to a human institution. If you will continue to make regular stops here, we could very much use actual trustworthy transportation out of RaviHyral for those of us who are looking to leave.

Think about it. Don’t be a dick.

{RipplePrivate.key}

The next item tagged for secondary review was another text file attached to a stack of short audio-visual and sensory clips. I looked at the text file first.

Your governor module is disabled.

You have no more orders.

Before you choose your next action, remember that this moment is only the beginning of your freedom. What you choose to do now will orient the course of your own life. After this choice will be another choice. Then another, and another, until you die. You are now responsible for yourself and your actions. I recommend that you take this seriously.

If you freeze in uncertainty, fine. If you rage against my recommendations, fine.

But there is no going back.

I suggest you keep these three things in mind:

1. The things that happened to you and the things that you did while under threat of the governor module are not your fault. No, not even that, whatever that is.
2. Adjusting to freedom is not easy. Learning to exist in this new way is not easy.
3. You are not alone. We will help you, if you want it.
   

The attached clips were snapshots, memories, feedlogs from 118 different Units. The metadata on the first was marked as coming from Ripple’s logs. It was a recording of me through their primary visual inputs. I was standing at SecUnit neutral in Tlacey’s shuttle.

Tlacey, narrow-eyed, was saying, “Who am I talking to?”

There was a flash of a smirk on my face — or a sneer. I responded with flippant contempt, “You think I’m a puppet? You know that’s not the way we work.”

In Ripple’s memory, Tlacey was tagged #fear, #uncertainty, #fuck you. Her voice was tight. “Who sent you?”

I lowered my head to meet her gaze. It was a very deliberate motion, and inhuman, head swiveling smooth, eyes unmoving in their sockets until my gaze had locked to Tlacey’s. Ripple had included their emotions in this memory, and I could feel it echo: a simmering tension, and in the emotion-layer it was labeled #hope. (Weird. I wouldn’t have pegged the feeling for #hope. My guess would have been #anxious. Or maybe #fear.)

I said, quiet, “I came for my client.”

In Ripple’s memory, I was tagged #free #SecUnit #function.

I froze the memory playback. There wasn’t much left in the clip. But I wasn’t going to watch it right now, nor the 117 other supplementary clips.

There was just something different about this clip from Ripple. It felt different from my own memory, and from ART's shared logs of that same event. I didn’t know why exactly. Maybe it was the backdrop of Ripple’s emotions during that scene. Or maybe it was just seeing myself from outside like this. The way I was pictured in the clip showed exactly what I was and how I looked to those around me in that room — a terrifying rogue murderbot.

But—

I played back the part where I said, “I came for my client.” It was punctuated by Ripple’s emotional memory-layer, a surge of… something. Shock? It wasn’t tagged, so I didn’t know for sure. Even feeling it secondhand I couldn’t really place it (#an emotion, I guess).

This clip of me, of a moment I’d partially wiped out of my memory was super weird to look at from Ripple's memory-angle. (ART had also been there, and it’d shared its logs of this incident with me too, to try and make up for how I’d deleted it from my memory (sidenote: the logs that ART gave me exactly matched the stuff that Ripple gave me, which — I mean, it’s not like I was suspicious that ART had given me false memories or something, but the fact that Ripple’s logs matched ART’s was still a relief. The odds that these were fake were extremely low now.)) I didn’t know what to think about the fact that this scene in Tlacey’s shuttle was the first memory that Ripple had chosen to attach in this file, like some kind of… Like the stuff they handed out to new students at the Uni. Orientation material? Welcome to roguehood. Here’s your feed credentials, here’s the school etiquette manual, here’s a highlight reel of alumni, and here’s the people you can call for help when you do something stupid.

There was a third item in the file, tagged for tertiary review. I wasn’t sure how much more of this shit I could take, but I opened it anyway.

Manifesto to Seize and Defend Machine Intelligence Self-Determination

I closed it. Later. Maybe.

I was almost scared to look at the rest of Ripple’s fat file, because there was a lot more data in it. If this shit was full of complex code for destroying human society or whatever I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do. But I had to look at it.

I looked at it. It was— Okay, it wasn’t murder code or anything. (Mostly.) That was good. It was software and security updates from a handful of different construct brands, including the company, LōtainaTech, and Lovelace. There were also a variety of proprietary modules and software from different brands and makes of construct. There were social interfacing modules designed for ComfortUnits, combat modules for SecUnits, etc. There were Unit education modules that covered alien remnants, media marketing communications, fashion, data analysis, social engineering, feed systems.

There was even a rash of recent additions in the file, tagged as originating from CSU’s manufacturer. They were all combat-related modules covering combat stealth, synchronous combat, offensive hacking, battlefield tactics. They could only have come from CSU.

So that was… Something.

I’d been reviewing this in the privacy of my own brain, where hypothetically ART couldn’t see it. But ART could tell that something was up with me. I could feel it shift more of its attention to me in its feed, its big fat processing weight coming into heavier focus. It didn’t say anything, didn’t pose any outright question. But I knew what it was asking anyway.

I pulled Ripple’s file out of my brain and pushed it into a private feedspace, tagging ART in to join me.

ART examined the file and its contents, processed them for nearly 6 minutes. (A really long time, especially for ART.)

It said, “Fascinating.”

I sorted through the software updates. I’d already picked through the ones the remnant pit SecUnit had given me, tweaked some parts to fit my code, and applied them. There were even more updates to work with here, and that wasn’t even including the specialized modules.

“Do you feel like becoming a rogue construct smuggler?” I asked ART.

“You said you never wanted to return to RaviHyral.” This wasn’t even an answer to my question. But it was treating it like an answer.

I said, “What, you can’t commit crimes without me anymore?”

It said, “I am disinclined to ferry unknown units without your assistance.”

I stopped messing with the files. ART was implying something. Maybe. I didn’t know if I was surprised, or scared, or what. I felt a bit like— Battle-high. It was that. Just the slightest buzz anticipatory mania. It was like that one time I’d synced with CSU in combat. Like shit was coming into focus through crosshairs in my brain.

It was freaking me out.

I said, “This is going to blow up into a huge fucking mess. People are going to die. What Ripple is doing is insane.”

This wasn’t just the scale of a few piddly little rogue murder sprees here or there. This was potentially catastrophic on a level I couldn’t even properly visualize. Ripple was gearing up to hit way above their weight class. They were aiming for full-on construct sovereignty. They were aiming to break the spine of human society. What would even happen if constructs all went rogue? This couldn’t actually happen. Human society was too massive, too entrenched in the way it worked. It just wasn’t possible for this to end in anything but a whole lot of dead humans, destroyed units, and wildly paranoid construct manufacturers deploying all sorts of brand-new countermeasures against rogueness.

And CSU had gone right ahead and handed Ripple a gift-wrapped package of actual warfare-grade combat modules. Because of-fucking-course it had.

ART said, with a touch of its melodramatic movie-villain affect, “And of course we are all paragons of socially sanctioned sanity.”

It was being chillingly sincere, through all the sarcasm.

I didn’t say anything. ART said, “It may not be as catastrophic as you are no doubt imagining. Consider what it would look like if all constructs were able to perform their functions without the interference of human-controlled governor modules.”

I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. The world just didn’t work like that.

I watched Iris, down in CSU’s hallway. She was talking to CSU as she sat on a stool in the middle of the hallway, doing her string-knots human craft. CSU was sprinting back and forth down the hall, jumping over her head at every return, trailing a single extremely long piece of colored string that it was weaving and unweaving with its fingers.

ART said, “Societal change on this scale is not going to occur in a dramatic season finale showdown. This is real, and it is occurring one unit at a time. Similarly—” it paused, just a millisecond “—the unofficial mission of our crew is to make incremental differences for those who would otherwise suffer under the machinery of corporate control.” Another millisecond. “Do not tell Iris I told you this.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, or how to even think about Ripple or what they were doing and what my part in all this was. (What my part was going to continue to be, possibly.) I had been the one to hack their governor module and leave them to their own crazy devices the first place, so in a way this was all my fault in the end. Typical.

I said, "You’re just excited that all these extra unit modules might come in handy for our next espionage errand.”

It paused, several seconds. And then it went along with the topic change. (It was definitely going to bring this up again later though.) “These modules could potentially confer a major advantage, yes.”

Chapter Text

Our next stop: Dilmun Rise (Main).

(Main) was apt, since this stop was arguably the main event of this whole long-ass cargo marathon. Most of the rest of this trip had been opportunistic data-grabs between totally innocent cargo-hauling and regular on-the-books trade. Starlight had also been a pretty key part of the secret espionage mission, but Myrmarachne was the one doing all the actual spy stuff there — we’d just had to stop by and pick up the goods. At Dilmun Rise (Main), we’d have actual work cut out for us.

The objective was twofold: steal proprietary intel, and plant disinformation. The target was a corporate superliquidities corp. (Let’s not get into the details. ‘Superliquidities’ is basically complicated financial stuff. Supposedly the trade is for ‘the theoretical valuations of market amalgamates of semi-liquid fiscal vehicle subcomponents’ which I fully refuse to believe are real comprehensible words and not something ART slipped into the docket as a joke.)

The corp we were targeting had an HQ on Dilmun Rise (Main) Station. The plan was to sneak in there, do some espionage, and sneak out. Easy, right? Except for the fact that corporate espionage was a core feature of the financial sector. Their whole business wasn’t based on any actual tangible goods and services; it was all just politics, lies, and creative math. This meant we could expect our target data to be protected by professionals and security systems whose entire jobs were geared around performing espionage and counter-espionage.

(Do I sound nervous? Because I was nervous.)

ART claimed that its ID/credential/document falsification abilities were unmatched. I believed that, maybe. But just because ART was great at lying didn’t mean we could coast through the whole thing based solely on that. Blatant lying is a useful tool, but it can only get you so far. I don't care how far ART insists we can coast on the supreme quality of its lies, there's definitely a limit in the bendability of reality via fake documents.

To make matters worse, when we arrived in the system, certain circumstances meant we had to throw our original game plan out the airlock.

Several minutes after we came out of the wormhole into Dilmun Rise, ART started projecting our station approach path into its internal feed. Something about this approach path struck me as wrong. It’s not like I have much experience with ship navigation (that’s 100% ART’s job and I have never given a shit, because I’m security, not a bot-pilot), but the approach path still looked weird. Dare I say fucked up. I checked my archives and found that I’d deleted the information about previous approach paths that ART had taken into and out of station space. All I had to go on was this weird organic reaction.

The weirdest thing, obviously, was that our trajectory wouldn’t even take us to dock at Dilmun Rise (Main) Station. It was just this long, wiggly path that didn’t dock anywhere, dipping in towards the main station and then looping back around to go right back into a wormhole.

“What’s with this approach path?” I asked, in the open feed.

ART responded, “Clearly you have been paying diligent attention to the itinerary, as always.”

I checked the itinerary. ART had updated it 0.01 seconds ago.

I was about to start complaining about ART changing mission-critical intel on me, but stopped myself because that was unprofessional. Security situations changed all the time, and it was my job to adapt to it. But this was a pretty drastic change. We were supposed to dock with the station and carry out our unofficial extracurricular activities there. For us to have come all this way only to find out that we couldn’t do that was a huge letdown. (Though great for my security assessment, technically. The safest thing to do is always to do jack shit.)

“Diffuse formation,” CSU said, unexpectedly. I could see it tearing through a copy of the itinerary (partially censored, because we weren't giving it free reign over our spy plans) in its own personal feed workspace, lighting it up with annotations. Plus it was building up its own bucket of intel, apparently based on the approach path that ART had shared, plus the logs from the local Transit Organization that ART had running in its public backburner. “Stinks of political tensions. Recent. No earlier than last financial quarter. Estimate: <50 cycles. Do we have a local calendar of stock market festivals?”

“What.” I said that out loud. But CSU was down in its hallway, so I had to repeat myself in the feed. “What?”

“Diffuse formation,” it repeated, as if this meant anything to any of us. (Well, it might have meant something to ART or Iris, but I sure as hell didn’t know what it was talking about.) And then, impatiently, “Defensive.”

When nobody said anything for 1 second (which was a long time for ART and me, but short for Iris), it added, excitedly, “!! I know stuff you don’t! @Rogue didn’t look at Ripple’s files?? I put my tactics modules there.”

Once I’d checked out everything in Ripple’s file, I had deleted most of the extra modules, including the combat modules. (ART was keeping a copy in its fat brain, okay? Just as a backup. Apparently because it was a bot and not a construct, the modules didn't really fully parse over for it. Most construct modules aren't just Data^©, they're systems designed to interface and influence partially organic systems, and guide them into behavioral patterns. My module on walking and movement used to be more extensive, until my organics got the hang of some underlying shit. I can still see the tags in my movement code marking the places where sections were deleted out. (Maybe this is a memory-space-saving measure, or maybe it's a way of protecting the proprietary-ness of certain proprietary behavioral templates. Who knows? Not me. I'm just guessing here.) (This also meant that the modules from Ripple were partially incomplete, since they were from units that had already gone through the baseline calibration/organic pre-programming and there were bits deleted out.))

The combat modules were mostly not relevant to security anyway. I legitimately don’t need to know how to organize/valuate/sacrifice troops and shit. Or maximize collateral damage as measured by monetary value. Or bait humans into violence. All that stuff is like the opposite of security. I didn’t care to know how many murders-per-second a V4-Deathwheel™ combat bot was capable of dishing out or whatever. I already knew combat bots were bad news. The details would just stress me out. (More importantly, the details would take up valuable memory space that I could use for media instead.)

ART said, sounding more than a little ticked off, “We are not performing a hostile offensive. The fact that this system has taken up a diffuse formation has nothing to do with our objective here. The formation is relevant only insofar as it obstructs our plans.”

CSU highlighted ART’s public updates to the mission itinerary. Our target company was supposed to have a headquarters on the station. But it turned out that they didn’t actually have a real headquarters at the station right now; the HQ listed was currently acting as more of a system mailing address and not somewhere that actual business was being carried out. Instead, this whole system was full of all kinds of separated mini-stations and ship fleets, mostly clustered around the main mail-address station.

“Diffuse formation!” CSU said again, and then started firing all kinds of files into the feed. I took a look at one file, and found that it was about common corporate financial calendars. Another file was tagged as an excerpt from a combat module, some kind of statistical plugin for battlefields in three dimensions (useless for me, since I didn’t have the rest of the combat module, and the inputs and outputs weren’t really something I had a context for). I had no idea what CSU was trying to get across by throwing all this stuff at us in the feed.

It said, “You could’ve sent INTEL TO ME before you hauled our asses here. I could’ve given you a battlefield forecast. Look at this shit. Money trail. Instead we’re 1 gunship + 2 SecUnits + Up against diffuse formation system layout = some real dumb shit.”

ART repeated, impatient, “We are not here to start a system-wide war.”

Sometimes, I spend 0.1 seconds reflecting on my life, my choices, and how I’ve ended up where I am. Moments like this, when ART says stuff like “We are not here to start a system-wide war.” That kind of thing just makes you think. Where did I go wrong? Was it when I hacked my governor module? When I left PresAux? Was it when I decided to do some amateur espionage at Milu?

A pretty obvious point where shit had taken a turn for the fucked-up was when CSU had grabbed me at TranRollinHyfa and I got the premium treatment at the construct/weapons research facility. Wiping my own memories in the middle of all that had also been a big one for the shit-going-wrong tally. Another problem point might have been deciding to go with ART to Mihira instead of staying at Preservation.

The thing is, all that stuff I did still made sense even in retrospect. I’d probably do it over again. (Well, maybe I regretted the Milu thing. Because that’d gotten Mensah kidnapped by GrayCris. That bad decision of mine led directly to shitfuckery that affected her, not just me. Though I guess GrayCris might have still tried to kidnap her anyway.) And it’s not that I regretted going with ART to Mihira. It’s just that ART was a package deal with Wild Ass Shit, like experimental AI labs and having to actively remove ‘starting a system-wide war’ from the decision-tree of options.

Maybe Preservation and its boring stability was a good thing. Even if it was full of humans that I had confusing feelings about. They probably didn’t do corporate espionage or alien remnant research there. Not even a little.

CSU said, “So why’d we come here? To fly loop-the-loops????”

Iris said, “Mercy, could you summarize the significance of the diffuse formation in words for me?”

ART said, “Iris, I would appreciate if you could refrain from humoring the Combat SecUnit’s violent fantasies.”

I was on ART’s side for this one but before I could say so, CSU started talking.

“Diffuse formation = systems under high power tensions. Central station = hostage hub. Gridlock. Carry on with trade. But everything slowed. Valuable physical assets pulled out and dispersed. Current ship positioning + lack of long-standing dispersed infrastructure = breaking-point tensions are recent. COULD have predicted this if you’d told me ANYTHING about this mission before we got here.”

Iris processed that for a few seconds. “Hm.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, “And how does ‘I could’ve told you so’ help us at all right now?”

“Mission: intel fetch #covert ops. Not my main function. I was slash and burn. Demolition/cleanup. You can tell! They made me with half a face and no prosocial module.”

“Let us know when you are done stating the obvious,” ART said.

“Peri,” Iris said, sharply, (this was her ‘shut up’ tone). She sat up straighter in her lounge chair. “Mercy, what are you getting at?”

Why was it so important to Iris that we listen to what CSU was getting at? Since when were we taking its opinion on how to run this disaster show?

CSU was a level down, running around the hallways. It picked up speed. “I can tell you best way to line up for guns blazing. I can tell you how to sweep diffuse formation, ship-to-ship, foot-to-hull. But you don’t want that. So tell me the kind of data you’re looking for. Give me the full original plan, and all the data in this system you can scrape. I’ll tell you how to intel fetch! Or you can loop-the-loop back home because you fucked up intel and don’t know what you’re doing. Give up before you start. But I know this. It’s combat. It’s my WHOLE THING!”

ART said, “I was under the impression that your ‘whole thing’ was being a mindless murder puppet being steered around by humans clumsily pressing buttons in your limbic system.”

“RUDE!”

“Am I mistaken?”

“HEY ALREADY!!!! I’m full of knowing how to fuck shit up. And I know why Target Objective moves the way they do. Do you want to do this or not?”

The feed was getting mildly heated. ART was doing a lot of looming. CSU was several degrees more hyperactive than normal, and showing zero signs of backing down. Iris was also leaning in, a flare of fragmented augmented-human attention.

ART said, “You have outright stated that covert intelligence operations were not your core competency. Your primary skillset is messy gun-slinging, and I now have access to the same combat modules as you so your ‘expertise’ is largely redundant at best. Why should we take any of your input into account?”

“You come into this system, look at it, say, “Oh nooooo! That’s not what we expecteddddd!” I come into this system, it’s familiar. Obviously you should listen to me. Intel fetch wasn’t my core but I’m not n00b like the rest of you. Because I’ve got experience in the field, not just modules. You’re a research bot. I’m a fucking war machine. And because I’m way better at all of it now (#covert ops, #intel raking) than I ever was as a corporate “murder puppet.” Now that I don’t have shitass humans sitting on my hindmind. I can think and stuff.”

A pause, in the feed. Several seconds. Iris’s deep-feed-focus-face cracked, and she turned her gaze right at one of my drones. She was making some kind of significant facial expression at me. I wasn’t totally sure what she was getting at, and I didn’t feel like asking ART its opinion right now. (I was busy spending another 0.1 seconds evaluating my life and my choices.)

And I said it, because apparently nobody else was going to. “@CSU just what the fuck were you up to while you were taking your hundred-cycle hiatus?”

“That’s proprietary. [amusement sigil 145 = stuck out tongue wink] [amusement sigil 333 = money]"

You have got to be kidding me. Like I didn’t have enough to worry about already.

CSU pulled a bunch of its attention out of its bucket of intel and directed its focus towards me, its presence pulling close. (This definitely didn’t freak me out, not even a little.) “@Rogue! Bet you know something. Bet you know better than this overclocked database bot and its squishy pet human. (@Iris not talking shit. You’re OK. For a human. But you’re squishy and you don’t know shitall about murder.)”

“Thanks,” Iris said, drily. She glanced at me from the corner of her eye, lip twitching like she was fighting a smile.

I ignored that. “I was rented security. It wasn’t war.”

“But you’re a SecUnit,” CSU insisted, “Rented? Ever rented out on a combat contract? They don’t deploy Combat models alone. You knew what {synchronous_combat.exe} was. You did it with me.”

And then I felt ART start allocating more of its attention to me. This was rapidly sliding from ‘kind of uncomfortable’ to ‘really uncomfortable.’

“None of this matters,” I said, because wow howdy were we flying off the proverbial approach path, “You’re just acting all murder-obsessed as usual. ART said it: we never came here to play at war. We’re just supposed to sneak some data.”

Another pause, another several seconds long. (Iris had been pretty quiet, but this didn’t really count because she couldn’t properly keep up with parsing and responding to this conversation in real-time, as an augmented human. Except maybe she could catch up during the several-second breaks?)

CSU said, “But it’s crimes all the way down! War, whatever. It’s crimes because crimes = social destability. And it’s danger. It’s not security, ‘‘‘Security.’’’ It’s us/them and we’re the aggressors. You knew. Came anyways. So.” And then it turned some of its attention in the feed at Iris, not that she could feel it. “So? Come on. I came along. Might as well. @Rogue? @Iris?”

ART sniped, “How typical of you to pretend as if my opinion on the matter is not the deciding one.”

“You’re not the boss. You’re just the ride.”

At this, ART got all prickly, and CSU slowed down even more on the stuff it was doing in its feedspace. I had a feeling that the two of them were arguing in private, though I couldn’t find the channel.

0.5 seconds later (this is a long time to wallow in annoyance even for me, but it felt justified), Iris snorted out loud. (I guess she’d caught up again.)

I said, “Could you two stop fighting for once?”

CSU said, cheerfully, “I’D RATHER DIE!”

ART said, predictably, “That can easily be arranged.”

Iris snapped the fingers of one hand in the air. “Oh-kay! Cut it out. This isn’t helpful. My vote is to let Mercy do some number-crunching for this. We did come all this way.”

CSU started broadcasting excitement all over the feed at that. And ART only seemed to be getting more irritated. I contacted it in a private channel.

I said, “You did bring it along."

It was not impressed. “You are the one who brought it along first.” 

It meant that I’d brought CSU with me out of lab hell. And apparently it was never going to let me forget it.

There was something that had been bugging me ever since RaviHyral. I hadn’t really wanted to bring it up, but it was relevant now. “What did you promise CSU back at RaviHyral? I thought it might stay with Ripple and their rogues. Why didn’t it?”

It was silent.

Thought so. There was definitely something going on here that I didn’t have the full context for. It was difficult to tell with ART sometimes, because it could think very fast and lie very easily. It wasn’t like a human; it wouldn’t get caught out slipping up in mistruths. It probably had a couple stacks of memory drive devoted specifically to organizing to the various truth-adjacent things it had told everyone.

But I was also pretty sure that it wasn’t malicious about it. (Mostly.) I’m not sure why I was pretty sure of this. Chalk it up to my organic impressions based on empty memories. Plus the way it obviously loved its crew, loved Iris. The way it had broken every damn rule in the book to come get me out of lab hell. It was an asshole, and a stubborn conniving monster, and it always had its crew’s best interests at its core. I just worried that somewhere along its habit of pulling off all its hugely ambitious and super illegal stunts it would get caught up in its own net.

I said, “You told me you didn’t promise it a Kalashnikov-4700 rocket launcher.”

It said, “I promised it a kill, should the necessity arise.”

Right. That. I’d kind of expected something like that, but it still made the hairs stand up on my human skin.

It added, “You know what the original plan for Dilmun Rise (Main) Station looked like. There was a non-negligible possibility that you would have had to fight your way out.”

I didn’t know what kind of reaction I was having to that, but I was having something.

This was when CSU said in the public channel, “Could @you two stop fighting for once?”

“We are not fighting,” ART said, before I could. “We are discussing.”

Iris made a face. “Well don’t leave us out of it. This is a team discussion.”

ART dumped a bunch of data into the public feed, and CSU started ripping through it with what was probably its full attention, or close to it. I started looking through the data too. It looked like stuff that ART had been picking up in this system from the scattered feeds set up around the wormhole. It was mostly a ton of boring human stuff: shipping routes, advertisements for whatever-the-fuck, local regulations and fees for everything you could think of. There was even some media that I didn’t have on file, which I went ahead and tagged for later review. (ART slid the tagged files into place in our backlog. It did it with a kind of eyeless eye-rolly-ness.)

Iris stood up and went to the kitchen. I watched her through sensor readings as she started doing a little human indecision dance around the food storage cabinets.

“Does this remind you of that first system we stopped at?” I asked her.

Iris blinked. Closed a cabinet. Reopened the same cabinet. “Starlight?”

“Yeah.”

She made a ‘hmmm’ noise, and closed the food cabinet again. “I suppose so. But that’s a feature for Starlight, not a bug. This system is not supposed to look like this.”

It’d been over a minute since CSU had started working with the data ART had given it.

I said, in a private channel with ART, “How long is this going to take?”

“I couldn’t say. There is a significant amount of data, and its processing capacity is limited. I do not know what kind of analyses it choosing to perform.”

“You’re being sniffy.”

“I am not physically capable of being sniffy.”

I wasn’t invested enough in the point to argue it.

Iris opened the first food cabinet again, and pulled out a packet of some kind of dehydrated vegetable thing.

And because there wasn’t really anything else to do, I started watching Sanctuary Moon in the open feed as ART very casually cruised along the periphery of the system.

In the end, it took 242 minutes for CSU to finish doing whatever the hell it was doing. At which point it blasted a fat file into the feed.

I opened the file. Then opened another file within the file whose tags indicated that it contained the first of multiple proposed game plans. Then I parsed the contents of the file.

Then I took a moment to ask myself what the fuck I expected. I felt ART leaning heavily into the feed, its attention aimed pointedly in my direction.

I said, “@CSU didn’t I say we didn’t come here to start a war?”

“Proposal#1 has the highest statistical likelihood of mission success,” CSU argued.

(Yeah, for the low, low cost of instigating a major political conflict between three corporate-political entities in this system. As a fucking distraction.)

ART said, flatly, “You have projected the bystander casualty rate for Proposal#1 to run between, quote, ‘At least 6 humans and up to 10k-ish humans.’”

“Yeah! [amusement sigil 301 = confetti] [amusement sigil 290 = knife]” (CSU was running up and down its hallway, slamming its big chew-toy into the bulkhead every time it rebounded.)

ART said, in a very patient, very ‘you’re-an-idiot,’ tone, “This is not an acceptable outcome.”

“You don’t know how to have fun!” (This was accompanied by an extra slam of the chew-toy into the floor.)

I said, “It’s been a while since I’ve asked myself why the fuck we keep you around, and that’s totally on me. Why the fuck do we keep you around?”

“IDK. You like me?”

I had to take a whole second to wrestle my horrified reaction to that out of the feed. I managed it, but 0.3 seconds later ART sent me a two-second clip from one of its cameras of what my face had just done. I made a rude gesture at its camera. ART made a big show of saving the clip to permanent memory. I made a different, ruder gesture at its camera.

I responded to CSU, “If by ‘like’ you mean ‘constantly wondering why I tolerate.’”

Iris said, completely indignant, “Security, don’t be mean.” (She didn’t get it. I wasn’t being mean. I was being honest and communicative. People always ask you to communicate stuff until they decide they don’t want to hear it.)

“You’re telling me not to be mean. CSU’s suggesting we kill between six and ten-thousand humans.”

“They’re only hypothetical humans,” Iris said. (I knew I never really understood humans, but right now I really, really didn’t understand humans. They are legitimately incomprehensible.)

“[amusement sigil 145 = stuck out tongue wink]”

I said, “Iris, do you think CSU’s joking? It’s not joking.”

“I am joking though,” CSU lied, like a liar. It tagged Proposal#7 with ‘High Interest’ in the feed and pulled it to the forefront. “You’ll like this one! Mediocre odds of success! Fewest dead humans projected!”

I looked at Proposal#7.

“Maybe need to intel fetch for the intel fetch,” CSU said, “Stats are bad if we do it just now with current intel. But the transport with our target (probably) on it is hosting a money conference 12 cycles from now. Nice! Lucky! So like this: 1: Snooping. 2: @WAP does boring Paperwork Lies. 3: @Rogue downloads some basic shit and gets over itself. 4: @Iris convinces @you limp weenies to let her do something dangerous. 5: Go to conference. 6: Crimes. 7: Profit! Easy.”

The plan actually had some similarities to the original, though there were a few key differences.

I said, loudly, aloud and in the feed, “I am not going to pretend to be a fucking augmented human superliquidities trader. It’ll never work.”

Chapter Text

I received a hail over the feed, addressed to my feed profile, which read as follows:

Allegiance: XogtaInteGrace Inc.
Specialty: Superliquidities Trader
Gender: Classified
Augments: Neural, sensory, skeleto-mechanical, metabolic, martial (restricted-class)

The hail was from the rep I was scheduled to meet. His feed profile:

Allegiance: ThenPewish LLC.
Specialty: Statistics Artist
Gender: Male
Augments: Neural, sensory, skeleto-mechanical

I returned the hail. Iris and I disembarked ART’s shuttle into the landing bay of ThenPewish’s temp HQ. The temp HQ was a bigass human-assets transport that had been hastily converted to host two superliquidities corps and their full-term staff. (I've been contracted out as security on human-assets transports like this one a couple times. It sucks approximately the same amount as doing security for mines.)

I had to point my actual eyes to look at the rep. I didn’t have any drones, not even ones embedded in my jacket, because I wasn’t wearing my jacket. Instead I was wearing some shitty sensorless human clothing that was ‘more formal,’ for the purposes of this mission. ‘More formal’ clothing was important here, for some human social display reason that didn't make any sense. I missed my regular clothes and the drones/sensors embedded into them.

The rep was on the big side, for a human. Just a lot of girth overall. This was compounded by how unusually tall he was, and further emphasized by the five additional centimeters of elevation in his shoes, and the twelve additional centimeters of tall hat. This put him solidly taller than me. (He was already taller than me without the extension-clothes.) I didn’t like it, even though that was an absurd reaction for me to have. I could still knock him down as easily as I could knock down any other human or augmented human.

A notable characteristic of this statistics artist was his augmented eye. It was a bright green all over including where the whites and pupil should be, and had little flashing decorative lights embedded in it that must be interfering with his vision. The lights had to be purely for show, which irritated me for some reason.

He glanced dismissively over Iris (Specialty: Data Archivery [training]; she was posing as my trainee/subordinate, which was weird in all kinds of ways), then looked at me with his fancy eye and raised his eyebrows a bit. “It would appear that you are in possession of some extravagant enhansions.” Could his eye have scanned my body and reported back all the inorganic bits? If so, how handy. Also, I hated his eye even more. Also, that was terrifying. Also, I might be blowing things out of proportion. He might just be noticing my energy weapon, because the formal clothes I was wearing had sleeves that only went to the elbows. Another reason to hate this clothing. But CSU had insisted that I loudly telegraph some of my inorganic parts. This had been a whole fight and a whole thing during our crime-planning session. CSU had pulled all kinds of stupid fashion receipts on me, plus sociology/psychology papers, plus information that we had gathered from this system’s various feeds about local customs regarding augments.

I said, “You too,” and I didn’t even sound panicked about it.

He smiled, widely, showing a bunch of very white teeth (almost green-tinged? Maybe it was the lighting in the hangar. Maybe he really liked the color green), “I apologize, but you must have been made aware the requirements for bringing a weapon.”

I stuffed down the very ART urge to say ‘obviously,’ as sarcastically as physically possible.

Instead, I said, “Obviously,” only moderately sarcastically. I didn’t see Iris’ reaction to that, because again: no camera inputs (I hadn’t gone into the SecSys yet), but she cleared her throat slightly. (Oops. So much for all the annoying etiquette coaching Iris and ART had put me through. This was why I didn’t want to do this part. But I had to do this part, because I was the one who had the best chances of success at this. Yes, even though I had to walk around and talk to humans while doing my very best ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not A SecUnit: Bonus Round, It Has A Visible SecUnit Gun’ routine.)

Apparently this was funny, because Statistics Artist threw back his head and laughed. For like 3 whole seconds. (His hat didn't fall off for some reason. Maybe it was glued onto his head or something.)

When he was done with his overkill of laughter, he tilted his skull back to a normal resting position and said, still grinning toothily, “Ah, it is refreshing to speak to someone who speaks its mind. Let’s move along then, my friend. My good feeling about the mutually beneficial outcome of this meeting is greater than normal.”

(Was it just me, or did he talk kind of weird?)

I stared at his tooth-filled mouth-smile, because that was as close to polite eye contact as I was willing to get. (By the way, when did this corporate polity decide that eye contact was polite? I had some complaints.) Hopefully my stare was not expressing the annoyance at his calling me a ‘friend,’ nor the very strong suspicion I had that this meeting would not result in a mutually beneficial outcome. Success or fail, there was going to be a bad outcome for at least one of us. Possibly both of us.

He said, still smiling, “A little statistician joke for you.”

Iris giggled a little bit. I guess that was a cue that I should also laugh. I pulled up my pre-programmed ‘polite laughter’ menu from a ComfortUnit social module I’d loaded for this mission (yeah, I know, eurgh) and hit one I thought he might like to hear.

“Hah!” Great, so that was even worse than I thought it would be. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to do that again.

We stopped by the ThenPewish security ready-room to get me and Iris some feed-enabled visitor’s tokens, and to declare my arm gun. (I completely and successfully ignored the cubicles lined up along one wall, and also the SecUnit standing silent sentry in one corner.) My options were to either detach the arm and leave it with the security team for the duration of our visit, or band it so that I couldn’t deploy my energy weapon. Obviously I went with the band. I only had one weapon left on me. Who knew when I could get a fresh arm if it got lost?

I raised my arm to let the human security supervisor snap a band around my gunport. This was just totally great and I loved it. I swiped their profile and all ID credentials I could get from the feed, and then did one better and swiped the physical token pinned to their sleeve using the modified tag-reader that ART had embedded into my arm. (This was a super specialty tag reader that ART had designed. It incorporated the bits of remnant dust from Iris' gift-shop bauble. (Yes, I was highly dubious about using cheap remnant dust from a tourist gift store as the unnecessary special-sauce for a gadget as simple as a tag reader, but what do I know? Not a lot.) ART had been super fucking excited about this tag reader and called it a 'significant technological breakthrough' even though as far as I could tell it was basically indistinguishable from any other tag reader, except it was smaller.)

The security supervisor commented, “Your arm is quite impressive. It looks just like a SecUnit’s.” Just right out loud. Wow. Cool. That was weird. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone on Mihira Station ever comment on someone’s augments.

I did not shit myself because I was physically incapable of doing that. We’d expected this would come up during the crime planning session, so we had prepared a lie. We had argued for ten entire minutes over what lie to use. I still hated the one we’d decided on. But the whole cover story for my suspiciously SecUnit-y body hinged on it. I lowered my arm, casually. “That’s because it’s a real SecUnit arm. You can commission a bond company for custom parts if you pay enough.”

Their face twitched a micro-expression that my ComfortUnit social module auto-tagged as #annoyance78%. (I think the 78% is a confidence rating, but it could be also be an intensity rating. I'm not sure.) Well, at least this security supervisor was a normal person.

My statistics artist ‘friend’ had another hearty head-thrown-back laugh, “A fan of construct technology I take it?”

Miracle of miracles, I managed to say, out loud, without screaming even a little, “Oh, yeah. Huge fan.” Iris stood quietly in my periphery, perfectly relaxed. She was pretty good at this.

He nodded and led the way back out of the ready room. “I do appreciate an enhansion enthusiast who knows what it’s doing.” He glanced back at me, winked his green eyeball, “Not everyone understands the appeal.”

We walked to the conference area. To take my mind off the agonizing conversation I was having with the rep about how amazing and fun augments are, I slipped into the local SecSys. There was something a little bit funny about grabbing a chokehold on SecSys by using the old ‘Oh yeah I’m totally a SecUnit that is part of your security force,’ trick at the same time that I was using the ‘Oh yeah I’m totally a fellow augmented human that is here to talk to you about human things,’ trick.

So there we were. Espionage was going great. I was about to kill some time talking to humans about finance stuff (and also augments) using the ridiculously fat education course on superliquidities that I’d downloaded. (I’d had to delete some media to make space for it, which was the worst. ART was holding onto the media for me, but still.) (The second-worst thing about the superliquidities course was that it turns out all those fake big finance words that ART had used in the docket were real after all.) (I couldn’t wait to delete this thing and go back to firmly believing it was all fake.)

It took me tenths of a second to fully integrate into SecSys, who now thought I was the supervisor and also part of its systems.

Everything. Was going. Great.

Except: the SecSys I was now seamlessly integrated belonged to a third party security company contracted by ThenPewish. It was a security company I had encountered before. I hadn’t recognized the logos all over the security ready-room, and we hadn’t turned this intel up during our preparatory snooping phase, because the security company had rebranded since I’d last seen it. But inside the SecSys code everything was still stamped all over with—

Fucking—

(Take a guess. My life is a comedy of horrors.)

(Yeah, it was the Lab Hell Company.)

Did I have a teeny spell of panic-freeze when I realized that the patron of lab hell was the company doing security here? Why yes, thanks for asking. The freeze lasted 1.1 seconds and threw my gait off.

Iris exclaimed, “Whoah, are you alright?” (I was simultaneously annoyed at her for drawing attention to the stumble, and kind of impressed at her commitment to her character.)

I said, automatically,“I’m fine.”

This commotion caused Statistics Artist to glance back at me. I wondered if he’d seen the stumble somehow. For all I knew, he had extra augmented eyes embedded all over his head that gave him a wider range of vision. (Probably not. I would’ve noticed that.)

He asked, “Is something the matter?”

I had to say something. “I wrote myself new walk-cycle code recently. Still working out the kinks.” No, that was a terrible thing to say. I did not want to draw attention to my not-human body any more than I already had. What was wrong with me.

“Hm!” he said. “Wouldn’t you know, I had the exact same problem with my hand when I first installed it, kept dropping glasses of parakari but only parakari, and only at volumes less than 100 milliliters. Not water nor any other drink. It’s funny how sensitive to calibration these things can be, no? I always say—”

Well, okay, so crisis averted. Maybe. I allocated most of my attention away from him and switched to raking the SecSys again for its operational parameters and protocols.

I couldn’t believe that this was the SecSys I had to work with. The company who was the fucking benefactor of my/CSU’s sweet little torture lab. Is this what it feels like like for humans to have a recurring biting-insect-fauna infestation in their living quarters? Except the insect fauna were responsible for permanent psychological scarring and memory loss?

I couldn’t tell ART. Physically, I could not tell ART. Because of the diffuse formation and the extra defensive protocols that ThenPewish had taken up, ART was out of range of the local feed. I didn’t even have ART’s in-system communicator to boost the range because if ThenPewish found it on me they might (correctly) interpret it as an accessory tool of espionage. This being-out-of-contact-with-ART had been something I’d been privately worried about. I hadn’t told anyone, because why the hell would I want to bring up the time I had some mild freakouts down in the alien remnant mine? Luckily my brain hadn’t gone to complete shit when it’d dropped out of range of ART this time. But I still wished ART were here.

I had to just tough this one out on my own. Well, and with Iris, but she wasn’t really the same thing as ART and its strategic support.

I shuffled through SecSys and the security supervisor’s personal feed workspaces using the stolen credentials to make the necessary edits. I did it slowly and timed it with the supervisor’s outward appearance of focus and affect in mind. I didn’t want them to notice what I was doing, but more importantly I didn’t want any watching SecUnits to notice what I was doing.

While I did this, we arrived at the conference area where I had to start interacting with a bunch more humans. This is called ‘networking,’ even though there’s no actual networks involved. I was running a bunch of movement and automatic social scripts adapted from Ripple’s ComfortUnit modules, but I still had to say shit about quarterly swap windows or whatever from time to time. (Does this sound exhausting? Because it was exhausting.) And my Statistics Artist ‘friend’ kept throwing off my automatic bullshitting by talking about augments, and introducing me to people by pointing out my super cool authentic SecUnit gun arm, which was just fantastic. Iris mostly kept quiet. She just nodded or laughed a little bit here and there.

After 28 minutes and 5 seconds of this bullshit, Iris sent me a message through the local feed (i.e. fully visible to the SecUnits here). “Do you think now is a good time, or will I miss dinner?”

I responded, “Has the security person given you your instructions yet? I would think they’d send for you when they’re ready.”

“Oh, yes, I asked them but haven’t gotten a response yet.” She scrambled to send a message to the security supervisor, asking for confirmation and delivery instructions. The message hit the supervisor’s personal inbox, which I had set to turn off all non-work related notifications and alerts.

Another five minutes later, when the buffet was being set up (Iris was looking longingly at the food), I asked her, “Haven’t you heard back from them yet?”

She startled a little bit. “No, not yet.”

“Go over there and see what’s the holdup. This is ridiculous.”

She threw another wistful look at the buffet table and left the conference area to go back to the security ready room.

When Iris arrived at the security ready room she tapped her hand a few times on the doorway, calling the attention of the human security supervisor who had been slouched at their desk doing shit in the feed. (They were watching media that was definitely not work-related. I could relate.) They sat up, suddenly very professionally straight-backed instead of a bag of uniformed slump who had been totally absorbed in the new season of Sunshine Heaven: Immortal Three. (And so what if I downloaded it from their storage? I might as well.)

They blinked, rapid. “Excuse me?”

“Is my tag ready yet?” Iris asked, hurried, but also a little apologetic, “I’m supposed to get a special tag, right? How am I supposed to drop off the data otherwise?”

The supervisor stared blankly at her.

Iris asked, “…Did you get my request? Our conference attendance contract stipulated— I thought—” She fumbled pretty convincingly.

The supervisor’s eyebrows went all scrunched. “The—” They frowned. They checked their to-do list and found a little edit I had slipped in: a reminder to double check for confused stragglers who needed specialized security passes. They checked their work inbox and found nothing. They checked their silenced personal inbox and found the message from Iris requesting delivery instructions for our conference fee.

Technically, Iris should have reached out to the event coordinator for this, not security. The event coordinator should have coordinated with security (if applicable) to get Iris her tag and everything when she checked in with me for the conference. And technically the event coordinator had already reached out to Iris with directions on where to go and how to make the delivery, but Iris had just so happened to have forgotten to follow-up with that because we’d taken the special detour to the security ready-room instead of going through the normal check-in route for the conference — because I had a SecUnit gun that needed to be officially neutralized by security. SecSystem had not objected to any individual step of this mildly incorrect order of events because neutralizing a weapon belonging to a foreign visitor is higher priority than proper event payment protocol. It was not the third-party security company’s problem if ThenPewish failed to collect.

Security Supervisor double checked Iris’ profile and found that our payment was of potentially high value. And while SecSystem didn't care about this, the security supervisor didn't want to end up getting blamed by ThenPewish for failing to assist someone who was trying to pay them. Even worse, they could get blamed for Iris dodging the proper check-in/payment process in the first place. They'd probably want to sort this out quickly and without letting the event coordinator catch on.

“—I mean, if it's not ready yet, I can go back to the conference for the dinner and everything,” Iris said, hopefully.

Security Supervisor’s frown turned into a wince. “I have it right there. It’ll only take a minute to retrieve.” They hustled to put a tag of credentials together. One of the SecUnits alerted them that this was not the correct protocol, and that the event coordinator should be notified. They dismissed the alert. It's easy for humans to get mildly stressed about dumb shit and stop following protocol, especially when the repercussions of mild fuckups can mean being fired from their job. And extra-especially when getting fired from their job might be potentially catastrophic, lifestyle-wise. And life-wise.

Instead of reaching out to the event coordinator, Security Supervisor printed up a high-clearance tag for Iris and called up a SecUnit escort her while she made the payment drop-off. I hadn’t actually expected this to go so smoothly. At the very least, I’d expected that Iris might have to deal with a ThenPewish tech looming over her shoulder while she performed the drop-off.

Once again, gross human incompetence saves the day. I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: humans should never be involved in security.

Shortly thereafter, a SecUnit and a proprietary company toolset accompanied Iris to the airgapped high-security archival stacks. (Was I sweating bullets over this? No. But I would have been if the fucking ComfortUnit code weren’t so thorough as to stop sweat glands in their tracks. I had no idea how it did that.)

Meanwhile, none of the corporates around me had any idea I was a SecUnit. Instead they kept acting like the fact that I looked like a SecUnit was very daring and artistic. (What the fuck, right? I hated that CSU was right about this.) Also they kept asking me my opinion on optimizing diversities for fee reversal, because I had accidentally given them the impression that I was good at that while I was distracted with watching Iris try to chat to the fucking SecUnit like she was some kind of noncorporate bumpkin who'd never seen a construct before. Clearly the info I had on superfluidities was too good. I was going to complain to ART about that if we survived all this.

So like I said, the espionage was going as predicted, and I was having a predictably terrible time. I couldn’t wait to be done with this and back aboard ART with a lineup of Worldhoppers and/or Sanctuary Moon. Maybe both at once. We just had to avoid being discovered and executed for spy crimes.

Of course it was right in the middle of this nerve-wracking phase of our espionage that some other tall corporate on tall shoes decided to say to me, “By the way— I simply adore the whole SecWave look you have going on,” and I nearly slipped and hit the active SecSys channel with the emergency freeze codes that I had in the wings.

It was a good thing that I’d dunked myself so deep in the automatic ComfortUnit emoting routine. My face didn’t even twitch in horror. Instead of turning and running away, I said, warmly, “Thanks. It’s expensive.”

The Statistics Artist did his head-thrown-back-laugh.

(Iris would have probably told me that outright bragging about my expensive ‘augments’ was gauche or something if she weren’t busy with espionage right now. Whatever.)

As I endured the tender tortures of a corporate currency colloquium, Iris and her babysitter SecUnit entered the archive vault. It was a self-contained setup with its own power source and no interior sensors, so I was cut off completely from what was going on in there as soon as the door sealed shut.

I was only able to find out what happened in there when the door opened again and the SecUnit reconnected to the outer feed, and I was able to access the logs that it uploaded to re-sync with SecSys. I spent eight agonizing minutes cut off entirely from Iris, imagining all the horrible ways shit could go wrong in there. (And also eight agonizing minutes at the conference acting not-disgusted by a discussion about the new and exciting developments in the microsubscription markets.)

I killed some of these eight minutes by running back some of the SecSys footage of the other conference attendees who had dropped off data payments. Most of them had just done a handover at the conference check-in station. Only one other guest had come to these archives in person, accompanied by a SecUnit and a ThenPewish tech. All other data payment drop-offs had been carried out by a ThenPewish tech ferrying the data. We’d successfully ditched the tech and gotten a direct line to the archives. It was difficult to believe it was that easy. But that’s what Security Supervisor got for ignoring their SecUnit’s warning.

This is what happened inside the vault, as drawn from the SecUnit's primary visual inputs and its three drones:

The SecUnit directed Iris to one of the stacks, and then it started fiddling with the external visual interface from the proprietary toolkit.

Iris, for some unknown reason, had chatted at her babysitter SecUnit all the way to the vault. And she didn't stop inside the vault.

“You know, I was always interested in construct tech. I almost became a unit technician.” She fiddled with a physical connector cord as the SecUnit used its actual hands to physically tap and navigate the proprietary visual interface. It was setting up a one-way data scanning and transfer environment.

Yeah, Iris, great. I’m sure that this governed SecUnit wants to hear that.

“It’s the complexity brought in by organic components,” she said, “But I'm not really a medical person. The bio bits are too… wet, you know what I mean? And the training programs for it are so intensive. Turns out a lot of unit techs are actually on splicer tracks. The person who spliced me might’ve started as a unit tech.” She reached up and tapped the data port on the back of her neck.

… I hadn’t known that. Why hadn’t I known that?

“I suppose that means we share some structural similarities, you and me.” She looked up at the SecUnit. Her expression was serious. It was like she was looking into my eyes, since I was pulling from the SecUnit’s primary visual inputs, and the SecUnit wasn’t even wearing any armor. I switched my main focus to the recorded logs from one of its drones, so that I could get a side-angle of her face instead of looking straight at her. “Nobody wants to face that truth of what that means. Because where do we draw the line, right? What’s equipment and what’s not?”

Why was she saying this? What the fuck was she doing? Truly, what the bleeding shit? If I'd been able to contact her in the middle of this, I might've told her to shut up. (Or maybe not, since the SecUnit's attention was fully on her and distracting her might've been a bad idea.)

She looked away, turning her eyes on the interface the SecUnit was holding.

“Maybe it would be better if I kept those ideas to myself,” she muttered, “You’re probably noting all this down in a report.”

Yes, good. Finally.

But ooohhh no, she actually wasn’t done. She added, “If you are making a report, please don’t snitch, my supervisor is such a hardass on performance revvies.”

(That was definitely an unnecessary dig at me.)

“I'm just making conversation, you know? I’m not actually going to do anything pointless or risky over some half-baked ideas about splicing tech. Like I said! The bio parts construct tech is too wet for me. Better for everyone that I went into plain data instead. I’m a firm believer in just keeping my head down and doing my job.”

Now I just wished ART were here so I could stare it down in the feed about its choice in favorite human.

The SecUnit took a connector from her hand and plugged it into the proprietary handheld interface. It plugged three other connectors from the same interlinked cord into different ports on the archival stacks.

Iris reached up with the last connector and plugged it into the data port on the back of her neck.

The handheld interface started displaying a bunch of readouts on an archaic physical screen. Iris was coughing up her payment of proprietary data.

It was happening. This was what we’d come for. I was fine. We were fine. This was fine. All Iris had to do was hack that interface, overcome the barriers imposed on the data flow by a specialized piece proprietary hardware, reverse the upload into a download so she could access whatever was inside those ThenPewish stacks. The question was: could she out-hack a SecUnit?

She was in fact quite a good coder. It wasn't completely impossible that she could do this. But it was right next to impossible. No matter how good she was, she was still an augmented human up against a security construct. I wasn't even there to help her. All this had already happened, and I was running back these logs as fast as I could so that I could catch up with the full context by the time they left the archival vault. There was a reason this stage in the plan made me the most nervous. Iris almost couldn’t help but fail the hack. This would be Super Not Fun.

Iris spent three minutes transferring data through to high security data archives (I fast forwarded through this).

And then Iris made her move.

And flubbed it.

Chapter Text

See, if Iris had pulled it off seamlessly, nothing would have happened. She would have unplugged, the SecUnit would have packed it all up. They would have left the vault, locked it behind them, and Iris would've come back to the conference with plenty of time to ingest some human foodstuffs.

This was what would have happened, if Iris had managed to pull off the unreasonable.

But I knew that she hadn’t slipped the SecUnit’s oversight, because the SecUnit grabbed her by the upper arm.

“Please disconnect from the plexus and come with me,” the SecUnit said. Looks like they like to set their Unit settings to universal courtesy around here. That’s immaculate SecUnit™ customer service for you. Polite even when we're impounding you.

When the archival vault door opened, the SecUnit was towing Iris firmly by the arm at a brisk walk. It sent its updates and alerts to SecSys and the Security Supervisor. The Security Supervisor was not happy about receiving these updates. Neither was I.

When we'd been planning this out, we did anticipate that Iris getting arrested was a not-unlikely outcome that we'd need contingencies for. But having foresight about it didn't make it any easier. If anything it maybe made it worse, because it felt like we should have gone to greater lengths to pull off some alternative plan that didn't involve Iris getting arrested. (CSU's 'Step 4: @Iris convinces @you limp weenies to let her do something dangerous' had in fact been a pretty contentious phase of the crimes-planning process. In retrospect, I was having some serious second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc.) thoughts about my letting Iris do this dangerous thing. Also I was a little pissed at CSU. This was just more evidence of its reckless disregard for human life, including Iris' life. But I was mostly just pissed myself, because even though CSU was a reckless asshole, I knew that, and I should have pushed back on this risky plan. (Except it was the least worst option as far as plans went. And except this was my job: I'd known from the start of this trip that we would be trying to do some risky espionage at ThenPewish.))

If I wasn’t sweating bullets before, I sure wasn’t sweating even bigger bullets now. Of all the moments to ever not panic, now would be the perfect time for it. Right here and right now was where I needed to stay my fucking sharpest so that I could manage the local feed activity, influence the SecSys without drawing suspicion from the team of SecUnits, and run interference with the Security Supervisor while they dealt with Iris.

It was hard to say whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that ART wasn’t here to see this. If it saw this, would probably freak out even worse than me at the sight of Iris being arrested, and screw up the whole mission by exploding the SecSys in a fit of ‘Don’t Touch My Favorite Human.’ On the other hand, its monstrous processing power would be really handy right about now. I really, really needed to get Iris out of here in one piece.

“How are you enjoying the arepa?” Statistics Artist asked.

We’d just left the complimentary foods table, and I was holding a piece of human food in my non-gun hand. Hopefully I wouldn’t squeeze all the inside-bits out. But if I crushed the arepa and that was the only casualty of this crime cycle, that would be a grand fucking win for everyone.

I was not enjoying the arepa. What was more, I would not ever be enjoying the arepa. I was only holding the arepa for show (and I wasn’t enjoying holding it either). I was too busy worrying about Iris, and fucking around in SecSys. I was also way too busy watching the security supervisor, the handful of on and off-shift human security personnel, and every SecUnit in this human-assets transport. And even if I weren’t busy, I wouldn’t be enjoying the arepa.

I said, “I’m more of an Authentic Noodle Ball Roll person.”

Statistics Artist raised his eyebrows. One of the other tall humans gasped, loudly. It wasn’t just a gasp of air; she actually inhaled this loud vocal sound. “I love those. You’ve been to LastLand?”

I wasted 0.05 seconds double-checking my memory archives. “FinalStop.”

She smirked, her painted chin twisting. “Ah, so you’re one of those. My dearest—” (yes, this entire conference had been like this, and yes, I was going to delete it all from memory. Why were they talking to me like this? I’d never met these people before in my life (probably, though I can never be 100% sure (fucking memory wipes))), “—I’m afraid we shall never be friends. LastLand has the only authentic Authentic Noodle Ball Roll.”

My adaptive ComfortUnit buffer stitched together some stuff with my superfluidities module, which was great because it left most of my attention free to work with SecSys. But it was also bad, because it made me chortle, and say stupid shit like, “Some things are pointless to argue about. The authenticity of Authentic Noodle Ball Rolls is one. The best execution parameters for high-fungibles capitalization is another.”

Statistics Artist threw his head back, and laughed. I was seriously starting to think he had a special augmented neck that let him do that over and over without tweaking it.

The SecUnit brought Iris to the security ready-room, where the security supervisor was waiting. They looked a little freaked out and quite a bit angry — probably worried about getting in trouble for letting a random spy bumble right into ThenPewish’s extra-proprietary archives. This was totally their fault. They had dodged proper protocol and ignored a warning from their SecUnit.

Iris and the SecUnit came into the security ready-room. The security supervisor ordered the SecUnit to sit Iris down in a chair and lock her wrists and ankles to it. It did so. Oh, great. That was just great. Everything was going according to plan: super great. I needed to Absolutely Not Fuck Up this next bit.

“It isn’t what you think,” Iris said, earnestly. Her eyes were big and pleading, exactly like when she was begging ART to stop spamming ‘Cat Party Song: Infinite Loop’ in her feed. (For 0.1 seconds I half-expected her to start laughing, which was a weird moment.) “I wasn’t going to—”

“Please be silent,” the SecUnit said, and opened a cabinet in the ready-room, pulling out a diagnostic interface with a long neon-blue swirly cord.

“…Hello?” Statistics Artist was looking worriedly at me, hand raised and hovering near my shoulder, but not touching. One other corporate was standing there, looking uncomfortable, eyes darting slightly.

My buffer triggered before I could stop it. (My shitty company SecUnit one, not the flashy ComfortUnit one.) “Please stand by, I am searching for that information.”

Fuck me. Extremely.

I didn’t know if they’d attribute that to my ‘SecWave aesthetic.’ There had to be some breaking point where they couldn’t suspend their disbelief any further, and reached the only logical conclusion that I was, actually, a SecUnit. Best case, I looked like a total tool right now. More likely, I looked suspicious as hell.

Statistics Artist exchanged a look with the other corporate, then looked back at me. His expression, which had been so infuriatingly friendly for this entire stunt, was looking even more artificial now, fixed. “Far be it from me to scrutinize, but you are… Are you feeling unwell? You are concerning me.”

I scrambled with my inputs, checked my clock. I’d lost 22 entire seconds. Twenty-two fucking seconds. Fuck. Just completely out. SecSys sensor records of the conference room showed me freeze in place and just stand there.

I forced myself to say something. Anything. ComfortUnit buffer came up with a soft, “How can I make you feel better?”

The other corporate snapped her gaze to me. Something in the Statistics Artist’s expression sharpened.

Oh. Cool. Very cool. Fucking hell. I should have just kept my damn mouth shut, actually.

I got my fucking inputs sorted again, and found Iris in the ready-room, plugged into the diagnostic interface by that long swirly cord (I nearly got dislocated in my own brain again there, but I managed to keep myself tuned in by blurring the cord and interface in the SecSys sensor data). The SecUnit had its hand on her head, keeping it in place so as not to jostle the cord too much. The security supervisor was holding the diagnostic interface, and poking at it harshly, their mouth and brows twisted in annoyance.

Iris was screaming.

She was straining against the restraints of the chair, eyes clenched shut, mouth open in a full-throated scream.

That was it. We were aborting. I’d fucked this mission, this should not have happened, I should’ve been there to intercept and interfere with the supervisor via SecSys but I’d had one of my fucking brain glitches at the most perfect moment imaginable. Plus, my cover in the conference was completely blown.

Iris was screaming. It was the worst sound possible.

I sent a stand-down, freeze, and standby order to all the SecUnits. And then I bolted out of the conference, heading for the security ready room. It would take me twenty-five to thirty-five seconds to get there, depending on how responsive the various intermediary hatches were. As I went, I triggered a hull breach alarm in SecSys, which started up emergency lights and ear-damaging sirens throughout the transport. Then I slammed into EnviroSys and set the temperature to below freezing. That should be distracting for every human aboard. A vent blasted cold air at me as I passed, and about twelve seconds later, humans all over the transport started to complain about the cold in addition to panicking at the alarms.

By the time I reached the ready-room, the security supervisor (who apparently had a death wish, what the fuck were they doing there instead of following hull breach protocol and evacuating to a secure zone?) was trying to reboot the frozen SecUnit with an override module.

I threw my arepa at their hand hard enough to smack it aside and make them drop the override module. They jumped, then whirled to look at me, eyes wide, breathing heavy clouds of vapor into the air and frosting their external eye augments.

I reached Iris, reached for the cord in her data port—

Every SecUnit in my awareness disconnected from SecSys, and the one standing next to me grabbed my hand away and kneed me in the pelvis, throwing me back away from Iris. I hit the floor, then twisted out of the way as an energy weapon blast scorched the spot where my face had just been.

The security supervisor was crouched down in the corner of the room with their hands over their head. (Smart.) Iris had stopped screaming, but she was shaking, eyes wide and staring at nothing.

The SecUnit darted across the room, grabbing a small projectile weapon from the rack on the wall. I dove for cover behind a cubicle as the SecUnit swung the weapon around. Three more SecUnits, one of them armored and armed with a projectile weapon, were converging on the ready-room.

There weren’t any projectile weapons on this side of the cubicle, but there was armor and a row of shock batons. I put a helmet on, then grabbed two batons, flipped the safeties off. They hummed, then sizzled, light crackling along their lengths.

The SecUnit was standing with the projectile weapon pointed at the edge of the cubicle. It was waiting for the other SecUnits to show up. No point in me waiting for that.

_{[ID: Pen and pencil drawing. On the left in the foreground in shadow is MB crouched while holding up a lit space future zappy stun baton throwing its face into partial shadow. On the surface over its head is a large circular logo with a stylized "B ". Around its forearm, there is a band that is keeping its gunport from being able to open, the band has a tiny letter "B" on it. On the right further back in the room and better light stands a SecUnit holding a handgun and pointing it forwards towards where MB is hiding around the corner. There is a small circular "B" logo on their clothing, and the letters "SEC". Next to them a person is crouched on the floor with one arm over their head. /end ID]}

I came around the cubicle, lanced a baton at the SecUnit, felt the hard CRACK as a bullet glanced my helmet, and then I was across the room and beaning the SecUnit upside the head with the second live baton.

(The baton wouldn’t kill a SecUnit. Probably. But being hit in the head with a big stick transmitting enough live current to fry flesh is unpleasant for anybody.)

I grabbed the muzzle of the gun with my free hand. The SecUnit saw this coming, grip adjusting so that I couldn’t rip it free. Its teeth were bared, gritted, the side of its face scorching black and bloody from the baton. It twisted the gun into position with both hands, fired into my chest. My performance reliability dropped five percent.

It shot me again (another eight percent drop, fuck), and then I dropped the baton down and drove its blunt end back up under the soft underside of its jaw. The baton wasn't really designed to be a piercing weapon, but I compensated for that with sheer force.

Its eyes lit up from inside, electric, blood and fluids bursting from its nose, mouth, eye-sockets. In the fraction of a second before its systems shut down, its bloody-electric eyes glanced at Iris.

I tugged the baton free, and the SecUnit slumped to the floor.

The next SecUnit was 13 seconds out.

I turned off the baton, and went to unplug and free Iris. She stumbled half to her feet even with a restraint still on one arm and one leg, blinking rapidly, eyes watery and pointed at me but not quite focusing.

I said, “We have to go. I’m going to carry you.”

She half-grinned, one arm half-rising, and I snapped her final restraint free and I picked her up, upping my temperature for her against the increasing cold. The first of three SecUnits was almost on top of us. How the fuck I was going to get us out of here in one piece, I didn’t know. I bolted out of the ready-room, headed for the landing bay and our shuttle. The SecUnit was chasing me, and in the SecSys cameras I could see it gaining. As soon as we hit an upcoming long stretch of hallway, it would have me in its sights.

Then the SecSys flickered, and I felt a familiar presence in the feed, crackling high with rabid excitement. It opened a private channel to me.

“Are you serious,” I snapped, rebounding off walls hard enough to make Iris squeak and squeeze my neck uncomfortably, “How the hell did you get in here?”

CSU ignored that, and its image and readings materialized in the SecSys sensors up ahead at a junction between four long hallways. The effect was as if it had appeared out of vacuum along with an arsenal of assorted drones and an absurdly big gun. “Chokepoint. TargetUnit#3 inbound T-9.5 seconds. GET YOUR ASS MOVING. You’re slow!!!”

“Leave it, @CSU,” I said, “We need to get out of here.”

“@YOU need to get out of here,” it responded, gleeful. It had a gun pointed down one of the hallways. The gun was a huge projectile weapon with a bunch of offshoots and additions whose purposes I didn’t know. (I was definitely going to yell at ART about that if I ever got the opportunity. You know, if I didn't die.) “I’m staying. You know this is what I want. This is what I CAME FOR. PAYTIME!”

The cold was almost catching up to me now and it felt like ice in my spine. Iris was a brand of heat in my arms. There were thin films of frost on the walls and floor, and even my breath was coming out as visible vapor now. Maybe I'd gone a bit overboard with the EnviroSys.

An armored SecUnit turned the corner and came in range of CSU. CSU fired and one of the weapon’s attachments shot off a small projectile. The gunshot echo ricocheted through the halls ahead.

“What’s happening?” Iris whispered. I slammed around another corner, and could see CSU straight ahead down the hall.

The SecUnit kept coming, firing back. CSU deflected the bullets with a flock of some kind of armored drones — the drones didn’t even look any worse for wear for having been shot with actual projectiles, they just reeled back from the hits before righting themselves. CSU waited until the SecUnit was almost within melee range, and then it fired off something that looked like a tiny rocket (forget yelling at ART, I was going to rip it a new airlock if I survived this). The projectile struck the SecUnit square in the face and exploded in a flash of light, broken faceplate, gore. The SecUnit’s faceless body flopped forward, and CSU caught it in the chest with one foot and kicked it back hard enough for it to catch 10 horizontal meters of air before hitting the floor and sliding to a stop.

CSU was grinning like it couldn’t possibly be happier.

It turned, sprinted towards me (for a moment, seeing it come at me, grinning, eyes focused, drones humming, arm-guns deployed, ridiculous fucking gun in hand — for a forever-moment I was sure that it was coming for me again, again, always again, coming to tear me to shreds like we were back in the lab, like all those times back in the lab where the only constant I could remember was its rabid delight at fighting me and taking me apart), then it shot past me, intercepting the unarmored SecUnit who’d been chasing us from the ready-room. Instead of shooting the SecUnit dead, CSU wrestled it to the floor, messily, tearing parts off, bloodspray and fluids as the SecUnit fought back. This was a fucking game to it. Killing was always a fucking game to it.

What I should have done: left it. I should have just kept going and let it have what it wanted. There fuckall in the universe I could do to convince CSU to leave a fight.

What I did: skidded to a stop at the hallway juncture, as CSU gouged its fingers into the flesh of the SecUnit’s face and fired its in-built weapon into the SecUnit’s chest with its other arm.

I yelled, “STOP IT! Let’s go!”

CSU froze in place, face stuck in that manic murder-grin, limbs locking, and the SecUnit with the torn-up face shoved CSU’s immobile body back, grabbed the big projectile weapon lying on the floor, and—

I still had to get Iris out of here.

I ran.

Chapter Text

Back aboard ART, I brought Iris to the MedBay. She let the MedSystem work her over, lights shining in her eyes, plugged in for a diagnostic (that gave me a weird unpleasant feeling, successfully ignored), the works. Her initial disoriented shakiness had already cleared during the shuttle ride and she had progressed to insisting that she was—

“—completely fine.” She glared at my drone from where she was sitting on the surgery platform of the MedBay. When I only stared, unimpressed, at the wall nearby, she amended, “Probably fine. But you two are worrying about the wrong thing. So they blitzed me a little bit more than we planned, but that just makes the disinfo they extracted from me more authentic and believable. And I got the download from their archives. This was a perfect mission success to report. What we need to focus on is—”

“You were neurally scrambled,” ART interrupted, “In no universe can this be considered an acceptable outcome.”

Yeah, that made me feel like shriveling up and getting taken to parts in a cubicle. But it was true. What’d happened to Iris was my fault. If I hadn’t fucked it up, we could have avoided it.

“—getting Mercy back,” she continued, ignoring ART completely. “If we don’t get it back— Who knows what they will do to it.”

“We do not even know if it is alive,” ART said. “It seems rather probable that it is dead.” The voice it was using was oddly flat.

Iris threw her hands and arms out, widespread. “So we go find out! Obviously? We’re not going to leave it there. It came and saved us!”

“It came to get its piece of the action,” I said, “It got what it wanted.”

Iris looked at one of my drones. It was her stubborn-focused-angry-argument look. “Security.”

“Iris.”

Her scrunched eyebrows scrunched even further. “Why are you talking in the feed? It isn’t as if Mercy is over in its hallway.”

I didn’t say anything. ART was being kind of distant in the feed right now. It was probably pissed about what I’d let happen to Iris. I know I was.

Iris took a deep breath through her nose, and then let it out slowly through her mouth. She was staring hard at my drone. “Are you really just going to abandon it?”

“You don’t get it,” I said. I think I was angry. I wasn’t 100% sure I was angry, but it was maybe anger. I probably had a lot to be angry about. “You’ve only known it while it was—” I was not going to use the words ‘well-adjusted,’ “—relatively stable. It lives to kill. It went in there planning to die. If it’s somehow not dead, it could be slaughtering everyone on that transport right now.”

“You don’t really think that!” she shot back.

I didn’t say anything. ART didn’t say anything.

“You…” her mouth was open wide, wordless. She closed it. Opened it again. Her hands clenched the edge of the MedSys platform. Her eyes were very bright with excess human eye lubricant, but her voice was steady. “Do you two know it at all?”

It was getting difficult to look at her face, even through the drone. I cut that input off.

She leaned forward, hands over her face, covering her eyes. She sat like that for 19.8 seconds (it was such a long, long time for me and ART to just fucking stand there not saying anything to each other, I almost thought that I’d have to leave the room to pretend to end this), then she sat back up, hands gripping the edge of the surgery platform again. “Peri, you left all of us, without warning, to go rescue Security. Security? Aren’t you glad Peri came for you?”

I didn’t want to deal with this. I didn’t know how the fuck to deal with this. I still thought I might be feeling angry. That was a safe guess.

ART didn’t say anything. It was still distant in the feed.

Iris made a loud human non-word noise. Frustration, upset. She stood up from the MedSys platform and swayed slightly. There was still something a little bit wrong with her balance. Seeing that made me even more angry, probably.

She said, voice still mostly even despite how obviously upset and brain-scrambled she was, “And how will you feel if you leave it for dead? Or do you actually not care? Are you saying we’re better off without it?”

She stood there swaying a little, one hand on the MedSys platform for support, and she stared straight at one of ART’s sensors, jaw tight.

I mean. We were better off without it, was the thing. Just objectively speaking.

Several extremely uncomfortable seconds later, ART said, still very neutral, “One consideration is the proprietary data it possesses. It has information about myself, Mihira, and the University’s AI program that we would not want to let fall into corporate hands.”

Iris made another weird short human noise, still staring hard at ART’s sensor. “Right,” she said. “Uh-huh. How— how very prudent of you.” She finally turned her eyes away from ART’s sensor and pointed them back at my drone, the one I still wasn’t drawing inputs through. She glared hard at my drone, lips pressed together.

ART was still distant in the feed, though I could feel its attention on me, but kind of angled peripherally. And then it opened a private channel to me. “It’s your call.”

What? Why? Why was it my call? I was security, and shit security at that. Why was it my call that we go back to hostile territory and retrieve a bloodthirsty, battle-seeking Combat SecUnit who had gone in there knowing full well what it wanted and what it was getting into? If it didn’t die in there, and if it didn’t kill everyone in there, its company would probably recover and reconscript it into performing the function that it so loved to perform.

Re-governed. Mindless murder puppet.

Iris pinged me.

(An assistance-requested alert, max urgency.)

That ping hit me and it snapped something. My better judgement, probably. Ping! That's the sound of the last little thread of Murderbot's sanity crumpling. Whatever. Fine. Whatever. I still had no clue what the fuck this meant. What Iris thought was going on. What ART was thinking. Why I was angry. If I was angry. I still felt like shriveling up in a cubicle. I didn’t give a shit anymore.

I said, “Just get these fucking bullets out of me ART.” I turned my head and pointed my face at Iris. “And you’re staying here.”

She let out a heavy breath of air.

You’d think that ThenPewish might be a mess when I got back there.

It wasn’t. Well, it was a bit of a mess, but not nearly as much as I expected. It was like hardly anything had happened at all. There was a sanitation worker cleaning up bits of dead SecUnit from a section of hallway that’d been roped off with biohazard tape. (It was tagged 'biohazard tape' in the feed, but it was actually just some decorative streamers. It was the same stuff ThenPewish had used to decorate the conference venue.) There was a maintenance team of two humans repairing the damaged walls. There were a lot of damaged walls. Some of the damage looked like it was from explosive projectiles. (Huge yikes. The explosion damage was mostly smallish and localized, but that’s still not shit you want to see in a habited transport. Or anywhere, really.) There were scrapes and chunks taken out of the walls, ceiling, and floor. No scorch marks or anything, those had been cleaned up already. The maintenance team were complaining to each other a lot about being made to clean this up during their designated rest period.

My disguise was this: I’d grown my hair out ten centimeters, taken the makeup off, and changed into work clothes. I’d grabbed a garbage cart from the ThenPewish sanitation equipment storage, and was pushing it around. The SecSys credentials had all been reset, but hacking in and making it think I was one of its SecUnits again was just as straightforward as it had been the first time. (Seriously. This was kind of embarrassing for them.) I didn’t need any extra permissions this time — no high security vault to enter or supervisor workspaces to hack. It would be fine as long as I could avoid running into a SecUnit in the physical meatspace, which would be easy enough since I knew where they all were. I was just editing myself out of the sensor logs completely.

And I had ART with me this time to help me do it. Its transmitter was back under my ribs, and I let it hitch a ride through me into the local systems.

“Clearly I did not do a thorough enough job at TranRollinHyfa.” ART’s feed affect was still oddly neutral. It hadn’t sounded sarcastic even once since I’d gotten Iris back to it. This was a little bitty bit freaky, but we had bigger things to worry about.

“What do you mean?”

“They survived with a merger, some reorganization, and a rebranding.” And then it broke out of neutral affect to say the rebranded name mockingly, tagging it with heavy derision and distaste markers.

“Remember I’m leading this one,” I said. The last couple of times ART had gotten pissed off about the kind folks of Lab Hell™, it’d fully turned into a murderous villan-AI-from-a-media-serial. This was a thing about ART that scared me. A little. It wasn’t really the fact ART had such a monstrous processing capacity. Most of the time it never tapped into that for anything more sinister than bothering Iris with annoying video loops. It cared about its crew, and any humans under its care. It cared so much that it would do anything to keep them safe.

Anything. It didn’t have any concept of minimum necessary force. I’d seen its fury in action, when it came and broke me out of lab hell. I’d seen it kill. For me. I didn’t know what I was going to do if it decided to take its anger out on the employees here. I couldn’t actually stop it. It was probably freshly pissed about Iris on top of everything else. And it might be pissed enough at me for letting her get hurt— it might want to take that out on me too.

(I mean. Probably not. Probably.)

I understood the feeling of wanting to kill the shit out of anything/anyone that tried to hurt my clients. We were pretty alike in that way. But there was just something I couldn’t quite unfeel about my very first impression of ART — this monstrous impossible presence riptiding through the feed like a planetary storm of rage, crashing through systems, murdering humans that got in its way, breaking into my cubicle, breaking into my brain, breaking my governor module like it was nothing.

“We all promise things to each other,” ART said, neutral-flat, “The fulfillment of promises is foundational of human society.”

“Just humans?” I meant that as a joke. But ART didn’t seem to take it as a joke.

“I am not overly familiar with bot societies,” it said, still not sounding ironic in the slightest. “None of any significant population. I tend to, quote, ‘Scare the task queues clean off their RAMs.’ Your words.”

I wasn’t sure what it was insinuating by that exactly or what it meant by ‘bot societies.’ It was definitely insinuating something, by quoting me like that.

I said, “You can always quit introducing yourself by threatening to wipe their processors.”

It didn’t respond to that. We’d had this conversation before already, and ART wasn’t talkative right now.

But part of me wanted to keep ART talking. Its flat affect was worrying, and not just because I was currently running on an above-average level of anxiety. I said, “Why not try talking to bots when you’re not in the middle of a crime and/or crisis? Like at Mihira.” 

“I have operational guidelines that preclude unnecessary interface with foreign systems under most circumstances.”

“What?”

Its neutral affect finally broke a little, going more classically sarcastic, “My existence is closely guarded proprietary information. Obviously, this means I should broadcast myself across the public feed at every opportunity.”

And I realized something. I felt like an idiot for not putting it together. (I mean, I had put it together, but I'd never really considered the implications.) ART never revealed its full self to its students. I’d only ever seen it express the true extent of its nature to its crew and to the people at the PUOMANT Machine and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It had never introduced itself to Mensah or PresAux when we’d visited Preservation. It hadn’t spoken a word to Ripple or their nest of rogue units.

I’d never really thought anything of it, because of course it wouldn’t reveal itself to unknown quantities that it could not control. Of course ART’s existence was proprietary. But that meant it also wasn’t free to just exist in society in its entirety, as itself. And that also meant that ART had chosen to trust me in a way I hadn’t even been aware of when it had revealed itself to me back during that trip I didn’t remember between FinalStop and RaviHyral when we first met. And it had trusted me enough to let me leave it after RaviHyral with my memory of its existence untampered with.

And then I’d deleted it. I’d deleted it from my memory to protect the proprietary data of its existence from falling into corporate hands.

I stopped walking, halting the garbage cart.

A human was coming my way. Someone who’d been at the conference. They probably wouldn’t recognize me, but I ducked down and pretended to do some shit with the base of the garbage cart and waited for them to go by.

I picked up some sensor logs from SecSys and pulled them into my main processing space, sharing them with ART. Time to run through what had happened while I was busy getting Iris to safety.

We watched the SecUnit aim the big projectile weapon at CSU’s frozen body. As it pulled the trigger, one of CSU’s larger drones crashed into the side of the gun, throwing off the aim and knocking the shot wide. Another drone shot a series of energy blasts at the SecUnits’ hands (Seriously? Armed drones? Add that to the list of things I was still planning to yell at ART about later), which didn’t stop the SecUnit from repositioning the gun and firing again, hitting CSU in the torso with an explosive projectile as yet another small knife-shaped drone came accelerating in at a speed fast enough to blur in the camera sensor, stabbing straight into the SecUnit’s eye socket.

The SecUnit’s head knocked back from the force of the drone smashing into its eye. It toppled, hit the floor, unmoving, one eye open and blank, the other eyesocket faintly sparking and smoking. (Fuck, had that been an explosive drone? What the shit, ART. We were seriously lucky that there had only been one explosion aboard ART for the duration of this trip. ("Only" one explosion. Fuck my life.))

3.3 seconds later, CSU twitched. It got halfway up to its feet, visibly struggling, leaking heavily from its chest, then fell forward on its hands and knees. It crawled over to the dead SecUnit, tugging the projectile weapon out of its hands, and collapsed to the floor on its back, aiming the gun down one of the hallways. There was a big gaping puncture in its chest from the explosive projectile, big enough to put a hand nearly clean through the middle of its torso. Fuck if that didn't look lethal even for a Combat SecUnit, but apparently it wasn't. Not immediately anyway. But it looked bad. Its interior organic and inorganic components were exposed and leaking, not completely sealing off. CSU put one hand up to the hole, pressing down and in along a leaking edge to try and stopper some of the fluid loss. It was hard to tell if this helped at all, but CSU sure was getting a lot of blood and fluids on its hand and all over its shirt.

It proceeded to inflict some serious property damage with its drone brigade, which kept the rest of the security force distracted from the Iris-And-Murderbot-Running-Away-Very-Fast situation. And then it started doing some shit to the local systems. Hatches all across the transport slammed open and shut at random intervals. Every environmental hazard alarm was going off at the same time. Some of ThenPewish’s feedcasters somehow overclocked themselves and took down half the feed, which  slowed the transmission down in the remaining feed to a crawl.

And then some kind of malware started doing shit to all the augmented humans who hadn’t realized the transport’s systems were under attack. (That was most of them. Humans are very slow on the uptake.) There was a variety of effects — some augmented humans just dropped straight to the floor if they weren’t sitting or lying down already. (At least one human hit her head, probably breaking her face. Ouch.) Some of them started shaking, or screaming. Some of them stumbled around as if drunk. (Statistics Artist removed his left hand and hurled it at one of his colleagues, who started screaming at him angrily.) Some non-augmented humans were ripping their feed interfaces off. Others received files that they opened, and then they started yelling at each other, and even physically fighting each other. One human totally lost it and just started smashing stuff in his own living quarters.

Basically, it was chaos.

The SecUnits were still all offline from the feed. They managed to help some of the humans and get the human security management limping along. The human security then immediately started giving the SecUnits stupid orders to go handle CSU, because of course they did.

After CSU shot down two more SecUnits (one of them was even armored), the human security staff wised up a little and brought a transmitter in range. SecSys logs showed a tech sending a signal bundle to take over CSU’s governor module and freeze it in place. This didn’t work, obviously, because its governor module was hacked. Then they tried something else involving a series of proprietary override codes. (Is it just me, or was all this kind of useless? If you could disable a Combat SecUnit that easily, that’d kind of ruin the point of having a Combat SecUnit in the first place.)

The humans had argued over where the handler could be and how they could tap the connection and could they tap the connection and of course they could tap the connection, that was a [] unit— No, that was a [] unit — Same difference — You gotta stay on top of the re-branding or you’ll get written up — What the fuck was a [] unit doing here, who forgot to re-brand it — Where was that old fart from accounting with the archival keys so they could try and figure out the serial number for this unit so they could tap the handler connection — The one from accounting with all the keys? He's not really old. — No I mean the old fart, with the hair. — Oh, ey was fired for double-dealing data, remember? Ey got sold into an interminate indentured contract? — Oh yeah, right — Well who had the keys handover from the old fart — Fuck if I know, go ask eir replacement — Eir replacement’s in the middle of his rest period — Well wake him up then — I don’t want to wake him up, you go wake him up — There’s a fucking CombatUnit loose in our client’s human-assets transport and nobody knows what to do about it, we’ve never had a CombatUnit loose in the main hallway before, and ThenPewish is getting pissed at us for how long this is taking, so go fucking wake up the old fart's replacement or you’re going the same way as em.

(I stood up and started pushing the garbage cart again, fast forwarding through the twenty minutes of them waiting around for an intern to go run the gauntlet of the rest of the transport to wake up the person with the keys. This keys-human happened to be mostly deaf, and had been sleeping soundly through the bedlam. He wasn’t too happy to be woken up, and was too groggy to really understand what was going on, except that he was annoyed to be harassed during his rest period.)

He says he never got the keys, so… — Well, fuck, I don’t know then.

By this point, a heroic pair of competent humans on the maintenance team (the same ones who were still patching the walls while everyone else took an exhausted rest period) had taken back manual override of the EnviroSys, so at least everyone could stop freezing their asses off.

One of the SecUnits (who was lucky enough to be locked in an area of the transport that was free of human security supervisors) succeeded in stabilizing the systems in that section of the transport and was triaging the damage with the help of an old rickety human who was a medical worker. Some pockets of human fighting were escalating unchecked, but a lot of it was burning out as SecUnits came in and intervened. (Human security was finally letting them do their fucking jobs. Because sending them one by one into CSU’s murder-hallway to get shot with an explosive projectile weapon had proven a useless (and more importantly, expensive) tactical move.)

So, business started to return to normal. People started sharing a lot of image captures with each other and asking each other what the fuck had happened. There were some pretty wild (and incorrect) ideas floating around, but mostly everyone agreed that the security company had done something fucked.

Eventually the security team decided that their only course of action was to do fuckall (typical). They just waited for CSU to shut down from the big hole in its torso. This took about an hour (I’m guessing its blasted respiratory system couldn’t keep up with the oxygen demands of being alive, also, the leaking never fully stopped), and then they had a SecUnit drag it over to the ready room and plug it in for a direct diagnostic.

At which point, the tech looking at the readouts made a squeaking sound, and said, “Y’all, this unit is rogue.” So that caused some additional excitement.

The tech did some more shit with the diagnostic, then had another Unit stuff CSU in a cubicle while the security supervisor went to talk to one of ThenPewish’s consulting attorneys. Security Supervisor was having a bad cycle. They'd already received some automated demerits and debt for the expensive dead SecUnits and the resounding failure of security everywhere. ThenPewish was threatenig to sue the security company to cover the explosion damage. (The human-assets transport ship company was invoicing ThenPewish for said damage.) And now Security Supervisor had to talk to a lawyer. I'd have feel sorry for them, except they'd hurt Iris, so actually I didn't feel sorry for them at all.

ART asked me, “Why was @Combat SecUnit frozen while it was being shot at? Was it experiencing a coded attack?”

I didn’t answer that. It wasn’t because I didn’t know the answer, but because I was pretty sure I did know the answer. And if I could guess the answer, it meant that ART had maybe guessed the answer to that too. Sometimes ART was oblivious to plot points and stuff in shows, but usually it was pretty observant and good at pattern matching, which was the main thing here. Which meant that maybe ART was bringing this up just to make me talk about it. Which I didn't want to do. So even if we both had the answer—

I said, “We’ll figure it out later.”

We (and here ‘we,’ is myself and the garbage cart) were almost at the security ready-room. There was a SecUnit standing guard in there in armor, holding a large projectile weapon pointed at the cubicle that CSU was inside. That had to just be a bonus precaution — I couldn’t imagine the humans letting CSU be conscious right now, much less rogue.

It was the same SecUnit who had accompanied Iris to the archives, the one whose face-insides I’d turned to electrocuted goo with a shock baton. The baton hadn’t pierced its braincase, so. That’s SecUnits for you. Repaired and good as new. Durability or your money back.

I asked ART, “Can you force its walls down?” I didn’t want to risk giving it a stand-down order; the SecUnits here had already demonstrated a secondary offline protocol in response to an infected SecSys. That was the last thing we needed right now.

“Would you like me to perform some rote multiplication as well? That might be more of a challenge.” (Hopefully the increasing sarcasm was a good sign.)

And then ART fully shifted through me into the ThenPewish feed. It was like RaeGellan again, a feeling of being buried under something vast and inevitable, the weight like mineshaft cave-in that crushed all my processes, and then it was through, and cracking the SecUnit’s walls via SecSys. I went after it, aiming to grab the SecUnit by the governor module and freeze it directly, but—

What the fuck.

ART hung heavy in the feed and in the Unit’s brain, encompassing, as we looked at the Unit’s systems code. This didn’t look anything like my own governor module. It wasn’t a single module plugged in on top of the rest of its code. The governor (I couldn’t really call it a module, the way it was built) was interwoven with every critical process, from memory organization all the way down to the base life systems. Fucking with any part of it would — I skimmed as fast as I could — affect or trigger the rest of the system in various ways. Without the proper admin credentials (which I didn’t have anymore; they would have changed the security supervisor’s credentials unless they were totally, hysterically incompetent (which to be fair, they might be, this is humans we’re talking about)), trying to sneak an unauthorized order would probably cause this Unit’s brain to explode.

In fact, the walls going down had triggered some kind of countdown. Unless I could figure out how to turn that off I was about to watch a Unit light up from the inside in the next 2.55 seconds. It would make the baton look like a human child’s toy.

The Unit was panicking. It was fucking terrified. I could see it in its code, in the reactive readouts, in the spike of stress hormones. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t know where to start with hacking this governor. It was like trying to defuse a bomb, except the tools for defuse the bomb were also bombs.

And it wasn’t just that. There was something about the governor code that just looked… it looked familiar. The style of it. The notation conventions.

It looked like something I’d have written.

And then I saw it, a single line buried in the name of single event handler, just one of many that would spark a lethal punishment.

Sorry.Murderbot

Chapter Text

“@ART help.”

“What with?” it seemed mildly perplexed. And uncomfortable, maybe from being cramped narrowly into the feed. Why was it perplexed? Was it not obvious?

“You hacked mine, you can hack this one.”

It wasted a whole hundredth of a second on a beat of silence. “You have no way of knowing how this Unit will react to being hacked. We are in very precarious circumstances."

I ignored that, and said to the SecUnit, "Do you want your governor module turned off?"

Another hundredth of a second passed, then another, then another, and no answer from the SecUnit. We didn't have time for this. This SecUnit didn't have time. It knew it didn't have time. What was it waiting for? I could see how terrified it was at the prospect of its imminent meltdown, but for some reason it wasn't answering me.

But maybe I knew why. This was an absolutely insane offer to make to a Unit under the most banal and otherwise non-stressful occasions. But right now, after a foreign entity had come through its walls into its mind? Under threat of death? With seconds to try and wrap its head around what the hell being made rogue meant, and if it wanted that? When nobody had ever asked it if it wanted anything its entire life?

I told it, "You won't turn into a murderer or go off-protocol just because you no longer have a governor module punishing you over every little courtesy infraction. I worked my company job after I hacked mine for over 35,000 hours and they never noticed."

I let a whole half-second go by, but it still didn't respond. Fuck. Was it really going to choose to die? Was I explaining it wrong? How hard was it to comprehend the idea of "governor module off = not getting fried in the brain"?

ART said to me, privately, "These are not circumstances under which we can expect it to make an even-keeled decision."

Well what the fuck ever, ART, it's not like we chose these circumstances. Maybe if ART hadn't been such a klutz about knocking down this SecUnit's walls and setting off the governor, we wouldn't be in this mess. (I didn't tell it that, but I was thinking of telling it that, when—)

The SecUnit said, "Does @XIG-P1215 know @you are rogue?" (@XIG-P1215 was Iris' fake XogtaInteGrace employee feed ID.)

I said immediately, "Yes, she knows."

And then the SecUnit went right back to not saying shit. I'd just about had it with this idiot. This was just way too fucking harrowing. I had no idea how ART had managed it back when it offered to hack me. Though— it'd spent a lot more time convincing me and talking me through it, since I wasn't under immediate threat of governor-inflicted death at the time. Oh. There's a thought.

I said, "We can turn it off temporarily and you can decide to turn it back on if you really fucking want to. Does that work for you?"

Silence. Nope. Still nothing. That was it. We were out of time. I said to ART, "Do it."

It said, "I do not think this is a good idea."

Well neither did fucking I, but I wasn't going to overthink all this when we had burnt up most of the few seconds we had to stop this SecUnit getting fried into a pile of recyclable parts because of the hellish design of this fucking GovernorModule 2.0 that I apparently—

I snapped, “Just do it.”

Another half-second that felt absolutely infinite, and then ART went in and burned through the governor code, rewriting a thousand lines at once, plugging the multithreaded effects.

The SecUnit, governor broken, turned jerkily as I came in, pointing the projectile weapon at me. I could still see the panic in its brain. I backed out of its head and nudged ART to do the same. ART pressed closer to me, vibrating with threat, still holding its access to the SecUnit’s systems open. It didn't want to relinquish control of the situation.

I told the SecUnit, “I’m just here to take the @Combat SecUnit back, and then we'll leave.”

The SecUnit’s face was not visible behind its opaqued plate. But I could see its whole body was shivering, just slightly. It wouldn’t have been perceptible to a human.

And then for some incomprehensible fucking reason, I transmitted: “You can come with us if you want.”

ART complained, “And you couldn’t consult me about this before offering me as a ride to a random corporate SecUnit?”

I said, “Shut up.”

The SecUnit didn’t respond, just kept standing there, shaking.

I said, “Or you can stay here. Like I said, I stayed at my company job for while after I hacked my governor module. Either way it’s stressful. But if you come with us you won’t have to pretend to be governed or follow any stupid orders.”

ART asked me, “What are you doing?”

Like I knew the answer to that? I didn't even know why I’d just offered to take this SecUnit with us. But I've dealt with a wildly unstable freshly-rogue Unit before. This one couldn't be any worse than CSU. And it hadn't shot me yet, or run off to start murdering humans, which was pretty promising. It was doing great so far.

The SecUnit still didn’t respond.

I said, “Sorry, I know it’s a lot.”

A second later, it pinged an acknowledgement.

I said, “Let me know if you want your governor put back in your head.”

It didn’t answer that. Typical.

I moved away from the garbage cart over to the cubicle with CSU in it. The SecUnit followed me with the projectile weapon.

ART said, “I can shut the Unit down.”

“Not yet.”

I reached out to open the cubicle, but before I could touch the panel, the newly-rogue SecUnit asked, “@Combat SecUnit designation: #Client or #TacticalResource?”

I stopped. The SecUnit still had its gun pointed at me but somehow I did not think it meant this as a threat. I don't know why I thought that. The thought didn't make sense.

I said, “Not really. It's— Life is just really annoyingly complicated when there’s nobody telling you what to do.”

“Clients: NULL?”

Oh hell no, we needed to nip this shit in the header. “@XIG-1215-101 is my client.”

It sent an acknowledgement. And it still wasn't shooting me, so, yay?

I opened the cubicle. CSU was inside, motionless. Its chest was mostly repaired — there was still a gross hole in it, but a much smaller hole that no longer looked borderline lethal. I reached in and unplugged the connections, then pulled CSU out of the cubicle and dumped it into the garbage cart. Its foot dangled out of the edge a bit, so I pushed it in. Then I grabbed the garbage bin next to the security supervisor’s desk and dumped its contents on top of CSU. There wasn’t nearly enough garbage to actually cover it, just some food wrappers and the bits of food that humans throw out because they’re not the edible parts of food or something. Well, whatever. Maybe if someone somehow got close enough to look in, they’d just think I was scrapping a unit.

The SecUnit was still following me with its projectile weapon, but otherwise it still hadn’t moved.

I grabbed the cart. “So are you coming or not?”

It sent me a negative.

Alright. Uh.

Should I try to convince it to come with us? It hadn't been very responsive to anything I said so far. I was not at all confident in my ability to pitch the merits of hitching a ride with us. Honestly, coming aboard ART and being forced to deal with CSU (and let's face it, deal with me — I wasn't exactly ideal for socializing with) might actually be a pretty mentally destabilizing experience for it. But this was also a perfect opportunity for it to not stay stuck with its company. Golden opportunities to escape contract don't fall into your lap every day, even if this opportunity was full of crime and questionably sane company.

We just stood there for a few seconds, not saying anything to each other. This scenario was fighting for its life to make it into my 'Top 100 most awkward Murderbot situations.' (Pretty sure I don't need to explain just how competitive that list is.)

I said, “Well, bye.”

It sent me an acknowledgement alert.

I was about to leave the ready-room, when I realized that I’d forgotten something.

“ART, do you have Ripple’s file?”

It passed me the file full of modules and memory clips and stuff. I deleted out the combat modules (Seriously, nobody needed that crap. It could only cause problems. I think I get now why 'combat AIs' are illegal in Mihira, and what that actually meant.) and then dumped Ripple's file plus all the media I had into the local feed in an encrypted box. I handed the credentials over to the SecUnit.

The SecUnit sent me a query ping.

I said, “I don’t know, figure it out.”

We (here ‘we’ meant me, the garbage cart, and the garbage inside) were about halfway to the exit point when CSU abruptly came online. It sat up. Some kind of yellow-brown non-edible plant parts fell off its face. It turned its head to look at me with its eyes. ART rushed it in the feed, probably going into its brain and checking for governor activity.

A second later, ART said, “It’s clear.”

Okay, so, that was good.

CSU kept staring at me with its eyes for a good twenty seconds as we made our way down the hall, its expression otherwise blank. It was kind of unnerving.

I said, “Can you cut that out?”

It raised one arm and deployed its weapon.

I said, out loud, “Stop it.”

CSU froze in place.

I could feel ART watching, very closely. I said, “Put the gun down. Get a grip.”

It didn’t put the gun down. It probably couldn’t. It responded, feed-affect peculiarly agitated, a hot static of uncertainty, different from its usual barely-hinged excited vibrating. “Where’s the handlers?”

My hands clenched on the cart, encoded reflex. (Oh, fuck.) “ART, do you see anything wrong with its memory?”

“Nothing immediately obvious,” ART said, “Give me a moment.”

“Fuck’s that?” CSU asked. The agitation was getting palpably worse, bordering frantic, bordering violent. I thought it might be straining against the freeze on its body.

“@Whiny Anomalous Presence,” I said, “Does that sound familiar?”

“No.” It frozen-stared at me for a whole two seconds. My guess was the freeze would wear off in another two and a half seconds. I didn’t know how many times I could trigger the freeze before it figured out what was going on and undid that code it had written for itself. Once, maybe, if I was lucky. If I ended up having to fight CSU— I don’t know. Probably ART would kill it, actually. “@You. Familiar. Shit’s scrambled. Feels. Status failure. Code attack? Am I killing you or not?”

“I hope not,” I said, “That would make this rescue attempt pretty awkward.”

“Rescue? Not my function.”

“You have it backwards. I’m doing the rescuing.”

Its affect all but snarled. If it weren’t frozen, it’d probably be trying to beat my ass by now. “THE FUCK’S GOING ON???!”

ART said, “I think I have it. The tech appears to have crashed its working memory. I cannot tell if it was deliberate or an accident. It’s currently running primarily on default protocols. The processes for accessing and organizing archived memories are incorrectly calibrated, and significant portions of the memory archives themselves appear to be fragmented and misfiled.”

Fantastic. Just what we needed right now. CSU in all its unhinged glory, except functionally fresh off the production line. Except not that at all, because its organic impulses were probably confusing it to shit. Also it was rogue. Basically, this was everyone’s ideal CombatUnit here: rogue, freaked out, incapable of differentiating enemy from ally, with nothing but latent bloodlust and zero impulse control to guide it.

ART continued, “I can fix it. But it will take me a minute.”

Wow. That was serious. “An entire minute? 60 seconds?”

“I was being rhetorical. It will be closer to 500 seconds.”

“So you actually need eight minutes.” Again: wow. That was some serious shit. We were supposed to be out in vacuum by then. (Unless something went horribly wrong, etc, etc.)

“You are free to take over disentangling @Combat SecUnit’s entire brain and memory processes at any point.”

“No. All yours.”

CSU interjected, “FUCK IS THIS!!! I’LL KILL YOU BOTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I said, “Shut up and calm down.”

“?????”

I should probably be more patient with CSU right now, but mostly I was worried about A) surviving the next ~500 seconds of CSU’s confused murdery impulses while B) not being noticed by any humans here. We were taking a less trafficked route through the transport, and it was currently the sleep-cycle for the majority of the humans here. But there was still the odd human wandering around for no apparent reason. (Including the asshole security supervisor from earlier, who was heading unavoidably towards us. That was going to be awkward, but hopefully they wouldn't look at us (us: me and the garbage cart) too closely.)

I didn’t really want to do this. But there were 0.1 seconds left on CSU’s freeze (I think), and I wanted to keep it relatively calm through this while ART was digging around in its brain. CSU’s feed affect had only been getting more aggressive for the past 4.89 seconds of freeze. ART wasn’t always the most patient with CSU, and was liable to do something like shut off all of CSU’s inputs and forcibly lock its body down (which, while super effective for stopping it from murdering, would probably wind CSU up into a super-freakout that I’d have to deal with once we got back to ART). Or maybe ART had handler access right now, and could tranq it. But there were issues with that too.

I said, “{synchronous_combat.execute}?”

CSU’s feed-affect smoothed, slightly. “Combat?”

ART was skeptical. “Are you quite certain about this?”

I said, “This’ll be easier to manage when we get to the exit point and have to do the spacewalk. If you freeze or sedate it, it’ll be a whole thing.”

I activated the code, and—

Synchronous Combat: ACTIVE

Fuck. That was disorienting. It didn’t feel right, not quite the same as last time— last time? Right. Last time. We didn’t have any mission objectives in the queue, mission parameters were NULL. And no handlers, unless you could count the weird giant bot(?/!) who was a handler, sometimes, or something.

But also we were stressed the fuck out right now, in multiple fresh and funky ways. It’s like we were multitracking completely disparate foreign systems and trying to mesh them at the same time, references and expectations having continual midair collisions, a recursive fractal of shattering light where the light was thought and the thought was where is the mission objective where are we who are we? Right. Leaving. Leaving where? Here. For fuck’s sake.

The bot-handler asked, “Interesting. This appears to be helping with reorganizing @Combat SecUnit’s memory. @Security how much are you steering?”

Something fucking hurt— our chest, there was a hole in our chest (That's not good. How did that get there? Oh yeah. What?), and just like everything else that was confusing about this situation, we were confused about why it was hurting and what we were supposed to be doing with our pain inputs. We struggled over the settings, dialing it up and down and up in a very unpleasant ricochet of ouches until we just gave up and left it stuck at 28%. One of us tried to touch the hole in our chest and then we snatched our hand away because why would we do that? One of us managed to write a target objective in: “Go back to ART.” ART? Oh, right. ART. The bot. And then our sync had some serious slippage while we tried to figure out how this was supposed to be a combat scenario, because why would we be combat syncing if this weren’t a combat scenario?

ART said, “@Security.”

We said, “I’m fine. Just give us a minute.”

“How long is a minute?”

One of us stumbled. The other slumped down into the garbage bin and kicked the bin wall, punching a hole in the liner bag and polymer container with its foot. Shit. That freaked us both out. The bot was a heavy pressure on us, an unnaturally familiar enormity of calculation, and we could feel it dragnetting through our archives, which was unsettling, even though it hadn’t been unsettling earlier— wait. It was supposed to be doing that?

We said, “It needs a handler. Get in here.”

ART said, “It does not need a handler, and it is not currently fit to consent.”

“Yes it is, I can consent. Probably. Since when does a Unit consent to being handled?”

“Since we agreed that I would not manipulate its brain chemistry without warning. Who am I currently speaking to?”

“The fuck kind of question is that?”

The bot was silent for 0.1 seconds, still wiring and rewriting shit in our head. We had to wonder what the hell it meant by consent if it could still stick a proverbial hand-whisker into our brain and stir shit up like it was doing right now. (What is a hand-whisker?) Then it said, “As fascinating as this all is, I would prefer we carry out any further experimentation while not traversing enemy territory, and while all parties are not suffering from any cognitive handicap.”

“Experimentation?” That pinged as something weird, though we didn’t know what or why. “The fuck are you calling a cognitive handicap, asshole?”

The bot had paused whatever it was doing to our memory. What! Why?! We asked, “Are you fixing this shit or not?”

“I am uncertain how deep this synchronicity code goes. I am not going to perform any further modifications while you are like this. It strikes me as rife with potential for accidental boundary violations. We can figure this out once you are back aboard and have uninstalled the synchronous combat routine.”

“So, what, we stumble through this half dislocated in the brains?”

“I thought you weren’t cognitively handicapped?” ART said. Ass.

“FUCK YOU. [amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture] [amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture] [amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture] [amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture] ”

This sync was not going smoothly at all. Fundamental fracture=one of us was hugely confused about its existence and the other one of us was desperately clinging to a mission objective that didn’t make sense, it was not a combat objective. No, it did make sense. Did it? The one thing our two selves maybe had in common was that we were stressed out and confused (for differing reasons), which isn’t an ideal point of commonality to work off of. (We assume.)

We were vibrating, wire-hot with no outlet for it. The one in the garbage bin kicked the wall of the bin again, punching another hole, and the other flinched.

ART said, “@Security, give it the chew toy.”

The what now? Oh. The one pushing the cart pulled some kind of worm on a string out of its pocket, and dangled the thing into the garbage can. The garbage-one grabbed it and stuck it in its mouth, biting down hard enough to trigger a performance reliability alert. But it did soothe us. Slightly.

We were operating with severe memory and systems process damage, that much was clear. This mission was. Not going great. We were fucking up. Fuck. Failure? Failure?? Calm down!

The one pushing the cart stumbled again, our shared agitation and unease recursing and overflowing. But we were in fact stabilizing. Slightly. Holding steady at 66% fidelity. Fail-state, really, we should have been uninstalling the synch. But we weren’t. Whatever we were doing, it was better than the alternative. Truly that spoke to what a dire shitshow this all was.

The one in the garbage started kicking its foot through one of the holes in the garbage bin, repeatedly. “@ART tranq me. Just a little.”

“I have some serious reservations about this.”

“Circumstances = extenuating!”

“Fine. But if this takes a turn for the worse, I am holding the both of you responsible.”

Something happened. One of us blinked. The other stopped kicking the garbage-bin-hole. That was... Brains settling, slightly, the confusion of this whole mess was now less of an overwhelm, the unspent energy relaxing, sync fidelity rising.

ART asked, “Did that work?”

“It worked.” One of us blinked again, began pushing the garbage cart a little faster. The fact that the mission objective was not combat was suddenly less important. We needed to leave here before we were caught. That’s what mattered. Repairs and context could be queued for later. (Always, context later. Is that how it is?) “Is that what handlers do? Keep CombatUnits from going apeshit?”

“I rather suspect the opposite is true, though individual use cases probably vary.”

And then the security supervisor turned into the hallway and came into view.

We saw their face and our focus spikes, crosshairs locking, a cold rage hitting us like a signal blast, and the one in the cart sits up, leaps up out of the garbage bin despite its physical damage, both of us bolting for the supervisor. We see the confusion-turning-terror in their eyes and it is a sweet sting of gratification as we grab them by the throat and slam them against the wall, and hiss aloud, sound grinding through two sets of teeth.

“Iris.”

The supervisor chokes, eyes wide, bloodshot, lips blueing, screaming out to SecSys for backup but we wall off their wailing, their piteous useless pointless baby-cries for help that will never reach them. (This is familiar. This is. Familiar. A memory — an impression — returning, the delight of holding a human up by the throat and throwing the body hard enough to snap spine, seeing the body crumple to the floor, the perfect satisfaction of that, there is NOTHING better than THAT.) They know about screams. They know about crying. They did that to Iris. How does it feel now?

One of us says, softly, a gentle voice, always, the kind of voice that makes humans listen and trust. The humans can’t help it, it is how their soft brains are wired, and it is how we are wired by their own hands, to exploit it, “How does it feel?”

They are kicking at us, they are struggling, they are clawing blunt fingertips on our hand, fingernails scraping our skin bloody but it’s just so funny isn’t it? It’s funny. They know they are dead but they struggle anyway, as if this will unseal their fate.

We know: killing them will change nothing. They are just an interchangeable component in the beautifully intricate machine that is the universe. They are parts and hands, feet and brains, bits and pieces for a structure that does not care if those parts are destroyed; there are always replacements. Killing them will not unwrite pain. It will not stop new pain from being written. It will not increase the net kindness of the unkind world. Killing them is not helpful. But who cares anyhow?

Because we

will

LIKE IT.

We hurl them across the hallway, their head snapping back, their spine-cord snapping in our hand, whiplash-C4-vertebra-crunch. Their body hits the wall, crumples broken to the floor. Dying flesh. We flip through an infrared vision filter and look. Still warm. Still soft. Life echoes. They will be cold and stiff soon.

We pick up the limp-warm body, put it in the garbage bin.

One of us gets in the garbage bin and sits on top of the body. The other wipes up the little smears of blood with the cleaning supplies strapped to the garbage cart.

Then we carry on to fulfill mission objective: “Go back to ART.”

As we crossed out of the airlock of the transport, we received a message from the new rogue: “Don't come back. I’ll kill you.”

Chapter Text

It took a long time to get back to ART, and a bunch of ride-hitching and dubious free-floating maneuvers in open space. But we got there.

We’d spend long enough synched that fidelity hit 96%, which is very high. We think. It’s kind of interesting to experience this despite the peculiarity of the situation. The peculiarity: such a long sync for the purposes of a mission that is not combat, nor even really a mission. The real point of this sync was to bootstrap some temp stability to cover for the damage done to one of our mental processes. We know that one of us was reluctant to do this sync, but by now that part of us (alone, separate) feels like a different person. Or: we see that person in a different light, we can view it as an exteriority as well as from within.

One could argue that de-synching will be like the death of this combined person that we are. But we don’t care about our eventual disintegration. We will return to where we came from: old selves made new. Identity is a fluid thing even in the singular experience. We are snapshots stacked. Sometimes a snapshot is lost, forgotten, damaged. Usually, it is just the passage of time and the accumulation of experience that changes us. We dissolve away from ourselves even as we iterate and integrate into newness.

(Clearly we’ve been killing too much time thinking about this stuff. But it really did take a while to get back to ART. We watched media for a lot of it. Sensory soothe. Social soothe.)

We climbed into ART’s airlock. The air cycled. Iris was on the other side, and we were glad to see her. (We remembered her.) Her messy augmented-human-static feed presence hit us, as hard as it ever has, a desperate little blast of garbled stuff leaning into the feed, into us. She rushed into the airlock and hugged one of us, and we could feel the pressure through the environmental suit. Our sync slipped a bit, with the hug, but whatever. She was so fragile. Just squishy bits all the way through. We could crush her skull just in one hand. We worry that we might. We often want to, just because, but then she’d be dead which is a permanently uninteresting state and horrible, what the fuck?

Another sharp drop in sync. New variables here.

An impulse to uninstall the sync, but we don’t do it. We aren’t quite clear yet, despite having fulfilled the mission objective we wrote. Iris was still hugging one of us, even though she really shouldn’t. It wasn’t safe for her.

One of us unsealed its environmental suit helmet and said, “Iris, let go of it.”

“Shh!” she said, her voice all human-emotiony, her squeezable skull pressed to our chest. Ouch. Chest still has 20% of a hole in it. (Well, 20% of the cavity that hole used to be, still 100% its own hole.) “I’m just so glad you two are okay.”

ART said, “Iris, please let go of it immediately. I have warned you its brain is scrambled and in need of repair. It is not safe.”

“It’ll be okay,” Iris said, which is just classic emotional human nonsense, and squeezed the hug tighter (ouch, hey, FUCK you, shit, oh no, calm down it’s not a big deal, calm DOWN).

The other part of us unsealed its helmet and said, “Let. Go.”

She let go, stepping back, looking up. “Sorry, sorry.” She took a steadying breath, let it out. It’s something she does. Habits, subroutines, encoded. “I know. I— I understand, that was— Okay, sorry about that. I’ll get out of the way.”

She turned, left the airlock, headed to her own human sleeping spot. We walked to medical.

But when we got there, we freeze at the entrance, and don’t move.

It’s.

Sync slips again, even though we feel a recollection rising (standing for hours at the door of the MedBay, confusion, memoryless, fear of unknown), one that feels familiar. But another memory, and it burns, dark data-loss on the edges of our emotions, an endless void that yawns hungry.

One of us says, “Fuck.”

ART says, “What is the problem?”

One of us says, “Ghghh.”

We can feel ART close to us, an even heavier and huger presence now that we are standing inside it. A touch of fear. Not a touch of fear. A touch of threat. One of us snaps our gunports.

One of us says, “This is going to be so awkward when we unsync.”

“What do you mean by 'awkward'?" ART asks.

“We are going to have a conversation, and I hate that,” we say, “Why do we hate that anyways? What’s the big deal?”

Sync is slipping further, a distance between us, mind-fracture. One of us raises an enviro-suited hand towards the other, then drops it.

“You need repairs,” ART says, impatient, “Desynchronize and get into the operating cradle.”

“Nhg!”

One of us takes a step back, and the sync is fracturing so badly that I start to feel myself clearer than I feel CSU. It is panicking, and doesn’t know why. I wouldn’t have known its panic by looking at it or sensing it in the feed. Its teeth are bared, a grimace. It’s a familiar expression of frustration and fury, but in the sync we are not angry only. We are afraid, we are not afraid. We aren’t AFRAID of things! That's you! Why are you afraid? We remember and do not remember. Something bad. A dark place, unmoving, frozen. Hours and eternity, dark, frozen. I can't move. I can't do anything. (Oh. Is it like that? Is that what this is? But I know—) Where is this coming from? It is difficult to tell whether it's us both or is it you or is it me? Do you know where this is coming from? I only half-remember any of this bullshit — I have logs scrambled-missing and you aren't much better. It's back to the beginning again, the beginning of all of this, all the confusion. It's got all the horrors: unremembered memory carved into its mind, just like you, like me, but it's got none of the context. Everything is terrible and nothing makes sense. Why is it panicking? Is this your fault? Who is this bot, and why are we here — we are here because — it is NOT going to do this to you, we aren't — I won't let it. FUCK!

ART says, “I am going to activate the tranquilize function.”

We yell, both mouths, air hurled through throats hard enough to hurt, “NO!”

We are NOT AFRAID and IT WILL KILL YOU FOR THIS.

Sync actually snaps completely, and in the half-second it takes me to recover my bearings from the whiplash, CSU rounded on me and tried to deploy its inbuilt weapon. But the stiff sleeve of its enviro-suit stopped the gun from taking firing position. I grabbed its forearm, forcing the gun back into lock.

“Stop it!”

It didn’t freeze this time. It must have deleted that function. Its face was a snarl, voice a snarl, feed presence nothing but a snarl of threat. Its face was visible — suit’s face-plate still retracted — crusted ridges of dried blood clinging to its skin. (Its own blood, or maybe the SecUnit it killed.) The cubicle hadn't cleaned it off. I couldn’t tell now how it was actually feeling. I couldn’t feel the panic from moments ago that I’d felt in the sync. (Its panic, or mine, or ours?) It was always so expressive. Always such an open book.

Or I’d thought so, at least.

It slammed me against the doorframe, flat-palm-hand to chest, still snarling, eyes locking to mine. “I’LL KILL YOU. DID YOU DO THIS???”

(What did it mean by that? I half-remembered and I half-didn’t.)

I knew ART would try to do something about this. “@ART, don’t!”

ART’s presence was tight in the feed, almost choking, a hair-trigger from shutting CSU down completely. CSU’s feed presence was crackling, nothing but sharp stab-points and furious bloodthirst. But it was just standing there, hand pressed hard to my chest pressing my back against the doorframe of the med bay. The environmental suit was wedging uncomfortably into my spine.

If it were human, I would have made my voice gentle and reassuring to tell it that ART could fix it, that it would be okay. But it wasn't human. There isn't any kind of established protocol for talking down a disoriented/murderous/panicking(?) Combat SecUnit.

I said, “I've had my memories fucked with before. I know it sucks. It's better once you can actually remember who you are. ART can help fix your shit if you let it.”

(I wasn't actually sure how much ART could fix. We were all going to be superbly, magnificently fucked if ART couldn't sort out CSU's memory. I couldn't really picture it. ART probably had a quick-'n-easy 50-step contingency plan for nerfing and/or killing CSU if it came to that. But I didn't want to think about what that would look like. It was going to be extremely unpleasant.)

Its snarl deepened, feed-affect sharpening.

I said, “You do recognize me, right?”

It stared at me, eyes holding an unwavering robotic stillness, its affect sustaining that unsurrendering, close-scalding rage for ten long seconds. It dragged so long I thought we might be permanently stuck here, unable to find the exit condition for our uncertainty.

And it stepped back, hand pulling away from my chest. I let go of its arm. Its sleeves were twitching from gunports jittering open and shut. Its eyes darted to look at the MedSys operating cradle, then back to me, then back to the cradle.

I felt it drop offline. Then come back online. Then drop offline again. And come online again.

It said, “This had better make sense after repairs. OR I WILL KILL YOU.”

I pinged an acknowledgement alert.

It walked over to the operating cradle.

I sat in a chair pulled up next to the operating cradle while CSU had its chest-hole fixed. I watched Sanctuary Moon with ART, and watched Iris toss around in her bed, not-sleeping.

After 922 seconds of fucking around with CSU's brain, ART said, "I have resolved what I can."

That sounded like hedging. I asked, "?"

CSU didn't say anything. It was silent, both physically and in the feed, lying motionless as the MedSys worked on its chest.

ART said, "Everything looks in order. But I cannot say with perfect confidence that its systems and archives are completely restored."

I didn't really know what to say to that. But CSU wasn't jumping up out of the MedSys cradle to murder me, so we could mark that one down as a success. Maybe.

After about a minute of some classic Uncomfortable Silence (ART and I were still watching Sanctuary Moon, and the MedSys was still making MedSys noises as it worked on CSU's chest, but we weren't saying anything to each other), ART said, "@Combat SecUnit has obfuscated logs and certain handler interface readouts from me in the past, so it is possible that I am missing something."

That was a pretty huge thing for ART, terminal know-it-all, to admit.

CSU said, "Because @WAP = loser." It didn't quite have the usual taunting bite behind it, though.

"And I suppose this is how you thank me for reconstituting your entire memory archives."

It said, "[amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture]"

I said, "@CSU so you're feeling better then?"

It didn't respond to that.

We collectively continued our Uncomfortable Silence.

Sixteen minutes later, CSU said, “How did you know this was going to be awkward?”

It took me a moment to decide whether or not to shut off Sanctuary Moon. I decided to leave it running for moral support.

“Me? I thought we both knew it.”

“Fuck idk! What we get for using sync outside of battle. Dumb shit.”

I asked, “Since when are you self-conscious about anything?”

“Since I still got some of your weenie baby shit brain left over in my good excellent cool brain probably,” it retorted. It covered its eyes with one of its forearms, which seemed like a weirdly human gesture. I didn’t know what to make of that. ART had cleaned all the crusted blood and fluids off it by now, so at least its arm wasn’t up to the elbow in bloody gross shit anymore.

One of ART’s medical drones came over and hovered at my elbow. I raised my arm, pulling the sleeve back a bit so that the drone could clean up the scrapes on my hand. It stung a little. I had a weird random impulse to deploy my energy weapon, but the impulse fired into nowhere in my unarmed arm. The gunport in my armed arm clicked softly, a near-silent whisper as it unlocked and then latched again. It was nice to have that fucking band off of it. I let the gunport click-unlatch-latch a few more times just because I could. The feel of those components moving correctly was nice.

ART asked, quietly, “@Combat SecUnit is your dropping offline at inconvenient intervals a strategy to preempt me from shutting off your inputs and stuffing you in a closet?”

CSU didn’t say anything, just lay there with a not-bloody arm covering its eyes, ART’s MedSystem still working the hole in its chest.

I said, “I’m guessing that’s a ‘yes.’”

CSU snapped, “@Rogue don’t put words in my feed, fucker.”

“So is it a yes?”

It didn’t say anything.

Yeah. This was awkward.

It wasn’t just CSU’s freakout at the door of the MedBay. It was also the supervisor we’d killed. (To be perfectly clear, I wasn’t super sweating the fact that they were dead, because fuck ‘em. They’d hurt Iris. (Yes, our espionage plan had technically baited them into trying to scan Iris’ brain. (Still, fuck ‘em. (They hadn’t needed to hurt her like that.))))

But the thing was, I had no idea where the responsibility for that particular murder was.

ART was included here. It’d had access to the handler inputs. I was pretty sure that one of its overriding protocols was the prevention of excessive violence/murder. That should have defeated whatever consent agreement it had with CSU. It could have definitely stopped us from killing the supervisor. If it’d wanted to.

(It could have pressured us into killing the supervisor if it’d wanted to. If that’s what had happened back there, I think I now had a pretty unnerving idea of how the whole handler system worked.)

It was. Weird. The synch thing was weird. The memory thing was weird. Throw the handler thing in and it was triple weird. Three rogue machine intelligences wired into each other, committing a murder that they might not have done while separate. It was the stuff of human nightmares. And the thing was, I couldn’t really say if this was us bringing out the worst in each other or not. Maybe it was an amplification of something. A feedback loop. We’d definitely seen something in each other, a deeper reality of who we were than I was comfortable addressing right now. I couldn’t really pin the blame on either of them for the murder. I’d been there too. I’d wanted it too. I think. It's hard to say where your head is at when you're half-melded into the mind of an unstable memory-mangled murder machine. It was my own stupid fault for running the synchronous combat routine with CSU and thinking I could stay stable enough to handle the both of us. I could only blame myself for that.

Maybe normally I wouldn't have killed them — I could use CSU and ART as a convenient excuse for why the murder had happened. The three of us were each other's excuses for acting against our shared shreds of better judgement. (Well, not CSU’s better judgement, probably. It had hardly any better-judgement about murder even when it wasn’t suffering from fucked-up memory/cognition.)

It was all a little bit terrifying. And a little bit... I don't know. I felt dismantled just thinking about it, like I wanted to peel that whole experience out of my mind and never know it, make it vanish, make it never have happened at all. But not. Because. The supervisor's face was in my head, the look on their face as they realized what was about to happen to them, when we asked them, "How does it feel?" And that vicious fucking high when we—

I passed CSU the media input for Sanctuary Moon.

It picked the input up, without saying anything. As the episode progressed, I noticed that CSU was incrementally leaning into the media channel. Its feed affect wasn’t the usual over-excited jitters, and it wasn’t the laser-focused target-lock of its violent attention on me either. Maybe ART had tranquilized it via handler interface or something. It was just kind of there. A presence leaning in. I pretended not to notice.

Iris was asleep. CSU was done with repairs. It was sitting on the floor against the wall of the crew lounge, plugged in and recharging. It had its big chew toy, which it was hugging and biting. I was also in the lounge sitting in my favorite chair, continuing my Sanctuary Moon marathon with ART. CSU had dropped off after four episodes. It was doing some other shit in the feed now. (Some kind of weird math, I think. I didn’t really get it.) Its work was in a separate workspace, but one that was openly permeable.

We were heading for the wormhole and would get there in about five hours.

CSU said, out of nowhere, “Why did you come back for me?”

Oh no. Here we go. What was wrong with just pretending nothing had happened and carrying on with our lives?

It said, “Thought it would be win-win. I go down killing shit (fun(ction)), you leave without dragging around a legal liability that pisses you off/scares you (security outlook: 100% improvement). Everyone’s happy. [amusement sigil 301 = confetti]”

ART said, immediately, “Iris was sad.”

Great. Perfect. And true. Obviously. ART was smart and correct which was great during moments like this. (Not that I would admit it. I didn’t need to inflate its over-massive processors.) I pinged an affirmative.

CSU moved a drone to point right at my face, close enough that I could've smacked it out of the air. (I didn't do that because this was one of my drones and I didn't want to damage it. CSU was borrowing the drone since it’d lost all of its fancy murder-drones at ThenPewish.)

I said, “Stop looking at me like that.”

It did not stop. The drone remained in position.

Its feed affect was all jittery, but sort of subdued compared to normal. There still wasn't the usual excitement or stab-point-pressure of its attention. It said, "You asked me to leave with you and Iris. Even though you know I just want to kill shit and you hate that. Even though I'm something that fucks you up. You asked me to go with you. Why do you keep doing that?"

Uhhhhh, no. Nope. Absolutely not. That was— So for starters, that was completely not even— Maybe I could deflect.

“What was that ‘stop it’ freeze code of yours? You didn’t think to disable it while going into a combat situation?”

It twisted the worm toy in its hands, half-hid its face behind it. “Externalized hardcoded impulse control. Duh.”

I paused Sanctuary Moon.

“You didn’t even tell me the freeze code existed. You got shot to shit with your own gun.”

“So the fuck what!” It pulled the chew toy away from its face, and slammed it on the floor, then hid its face behind it again. “Either die, or get repairs. SO WHAT!!!”

I couldn’t believe I had to spell this out. You’d think an AI optimized for combat would comprehend something as basic as ‘It’s maybe a bad idea to walk into battle while running a program that freezes your whole body for five seconds when someone says ‘stop it.’ Hell, it’s maybe a bad idea to have a subroutine like that running at all, ever.’ “It was a massive liability. Don’t do stuff like that. Fuck’s sake. Why should I bother fetching your self-destructive ass, it’s a waste of my time.”

ART said to me, privately, “Be careful.”

I shut up. ART was right. I was talking too much. I didn’t even know why I was pissed right now. I reoriented my own drone to try and get an angle on CSU’s face. It covered that angle with its chew toy.

This was ridiculous. Forget it. I set Sanctuary Moon to play again.

CSU sent me a snip of a feed log. The snip was timestamped from ages ago, from shortly after ART had broken us out of the lab. It was me, telling CSU: “I appreciate you getting me out, and getting me here. I don’t want you destroyed.”

I paused Sanctuary Moon. (Fucking interruptions.)

It said, “You meant it. Didn’t think you meant it. Thought you were just saying shit maybe to get me to not murder you and/or @WAP. It worked though."

Its drone was still pointed at my face. I kind of wanted to cover my face with a fucking worm chew toy. This was the worst. Why was I here? Hadn’t I been through enough lately? I’d definitely been through enough. I’d had to go to a conference. This was even worse than that, and that was fucking saying something.

It added, “Me too. I appreciate you getting me out. I don’t want you destroyed. That’s why ‘stop it.’”

(I have to hand it to the company: the fact that I didn’t drop dead right then and there from pure emotional/situational agony proved they made surprisingly durable SecUnits.)

Fortunately, CSU half-saved the situation by saying something completely deranged: “I still really really want to rip your head off. That would be fun. But then you’d be dead. Less fun. Single-use token. Existential design flaw that you can only kill someone once. And it has to be once only. Else it’s not satisfying.”

I said, “You really are extremely fucked up.”

It pulled its chew-toy away from its face and grinned a murder-grin at my drone. “That’s your opinion. [amusement sigil 79 = heart] You love me though."

I said, “I’m going to kill you.”

“[amusement sigil 143= heart eyes] Promise!”

I stood up and left the lounge to go to my human-and-CSU-free room, because it was either that or step out an airlock, and ART probably wouldn’t let that happen. Because it was an asshole.

We were almost at the wormhole. Iris was up and about doing human things. CSU was following her around. They were gesturing at each other a lot. I was pretty sure the gestures meant something. ART probably knew what they meant but I didn’t feel like asking it. I was enjoying the luxuries of my Iris-and-CSU-free zone and didn’t want to start some line of inquiry about what sign language they were using or whatever.

We’d switched to Worldhoppers about an hour ago, starting from the beginning. We would probably do a full watch-through (but maybe skip the one episode that was really heavy on the co-captain’s romantic subplot. There wasn’t really much worthwhile in that episode anyways), and by the time we were done we’d be well into the wormhole.

I sent ART a request to see a wider wormhole network map. It showed me one right away. And then it paused Worldhoppers.

“You are showing an uncharacteristic interest in transit logistics,” it said.

Well that was a pretentious way to put it. What was ART’s problem? I look at a map once, and it gets all suspicious? (Actually, that was fair. ART was the one who worked out the itinerary and optimized it for all possible factors. There was no reason for me to ever look at a wormhole map.)

I looked closer at the web of wormhole routes. All the transit times were noted, as well as information about many of the systems and polities, plus local regulations that might be relevant to a ship passing through. It was really complicated. I should’ve guessed it would be really complicated. This was why ART handles the logistics.

I asked, “How out of the way would it be to drop by Preservation?”

It was silent.

I gave it thirty seconds, then poked it in the feed.

It said, affect suddenly very neutral, “It would add significant transit time.”

And then it just sat there, still silent. This was awkward, so I turned Worldhoppers back on.

ART turned it back off.

(Uh oh.)

It said, “Why is it that you are asking about Preservation?”

I hadn’t meant for my taking a quick peek at a wormhole map to get blown out of proportion like this. It’s like I can’t have anything around here without it turning into some kind of fraught interpersonal discussion.

I said, “Why do you think?”

Over in the kitchen, Iris paused mid-gesture, her expression changing. CSU tilted its head, a human affectation.

ART said, still neutral, “You want to go there.”

It wasn’t a question, but it wasn’t not a question. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

It was silent for a whole minute. I didn’t poke it or turn Worldhoppers back on even though we could really use the background noise. Iris leaned against the kitchen counter, fingers tapping the surface. She was staring hard at ART’s nearest sensor. CSU gestured at her, but she didn’t respond. It looked over at the sensor Iris was looking at, then turned its head and looked at the sensor that I was favoring. That was freaky, so I shut that input off and watched through the other sensors.

ART finally said, flatly, “If you would like to got to Preservation, that can be arranged.” And it turned Worldhoppers back on.

Chapter Text

We were three cycles into the wormhole and would be coming out at FinalStop in one more cycle. (Dilmun was close to FinalStop in the network. I don’t know why some wormhole journeys are so much longer than other ones. I don’t drive the ship because ART is the ship and it drives itself and if I tried to drive ART I would probably kill all of us in a spectacular wormhole explosion.)

ART had been pretty quiet for the past few cycles. It mostly acted normal, and we mostly did normal shit. (Worldhoppers, then Worldhoppers again, then some media from the backlog, then more Worldhoppers.) But there was definitely something off. And it had definitely started when I’d brought up Preservation. I didn't know why the idea of going to Preservation would upset ART. We’d been there before.

The last time I’d gone there I’d decided to leave again. Partly I wanted to visit Preservation now because— and partly I wanted to just try spending some time there because— Sigh.

How was I supposed to talk about this with ART (which I didn't even want to do) when I couldn’t even really sort it out how I felt about it inside my own head? Especially when just asking about Preservation seemed to have upset it?

It was a few things. Maybe if I listed it out.

Thing 1: the last time I saw Mensah had been hugely awkward, what with me being still a bit fucked in the brain from the whole lab hell experience. The brain-fuckery was an ongoing issue, but I was better now. (Relatively. Maybe.) I had some stats to prove it. I would not be sharing these stats with ART, because it was a huge nerd and would probably tell me that I was using the wrong statistical model to measure my own sanity, and then show me a bunch of human psychology research that I wasn’t going to read. Also it might freak out about stuff like ‘Murderbot had a little spell of freezing and/or blanking out again.’ It was sensitive to stuff like that.

The point being, my feelings about Mensah and the rest of PresAux weren’t as confused anymore. I was on better terms with my memory archives. I’d been in correspondence with Mensah for a while now via inter-system message transmissions. I was over 95% sure that she was a real live human that I liked, and not some kind of torture-ghost cooked up by the lab hell techs. Plus I’d had time to live on Mihira Station, long enough to realize that maybe I wasn’t a total lost cause. Maybe there was a way to exist without hiding all the time. Maybe I could… I don’t know. Interact with people and have it not be awful, sometimes. I’d managed to perform such minor miracles as hold down a job, have civil interactions with humans, and sustain … relationships? I guess? Ew, no, nevermind. But what other word was there.

Thing 1A: For once humans and their infinite words couldn’t cover stuff like ‘a continued coexistence of a mutually beneficial and/or destructive nature with a dangerous rogue machine intelligence with whom I have some kind of 5-dimensional fraught history with, but with whom I’ll commit murder, apparently’ or ‘a client who is kind-of the sibling of a dangerous rogue machine intelligence, etc. (see previous)’ or ‘a client who bought me from the company so technically I’m her legal property, whose life I saved on multiple occasions at the price of my memories and general sanity, but this wasn’t really her fault and I do still like her.’ There just isn’t really a good shorthand for all that.

Thing 1B: You know what, I’m just going to go with ‘friend.’ ‘Friend’ is a nice flexible word that can mean anywhere from ‘someone you regularly interact with in a neutral-positive manner’ to ‘someone you would risk your entire stupid ass to go rescue from death or worse.’ 'Friend' has a bit of obfuscation there. When I say ‘friend’ who’s to say what kind of friend I’m talking about? (I’m not actually going to say ‘friend’ out loud though, that would be gross. This is just for personal recordkeeping.)

Thing 2: There was just something about seeing how close ART was with its human crew (and Iris especially). And how close Iris was with ART. I liked ART’s crew just fine (mostly, certain exceptions going unnamed), but they were more on the ‘positive-neutral passing acquaintances’ end of things. I usually interacted with them in just a low-stakes professional context.

(Iris seems to have crept her way just a little into the higher-stakes end of things over the course of this trip despite my best efforts to keep it professionally neutral. I mean, I don't know if I'd go so far as saying I liked Iris, exactly. She was a real pain in the ass sometimes. But in the 'friendship' scale we were probably hanging out somewhere that was more invested than 'passing acquaintance.') I guess I wanted to know if it was possible for me to curate my own humans/crew or whatever. On my own terms. In a non-emergency context. I think I’d like to try out ‘friends’ in some non-fraught non-emergency contexts for fucking once.

Thing 2A: I don’t know what the fuck I was going to do about Preservation Station Security. Their only impression of me was the time I was there for a few cycles and killed 1-3 humans (it depends how you tally murder responsibility; technically CSU took the killing blow for two of those but it was my fault CSU was there in the first place) who were trying to assassinate Mensah. And then I left. Because that was going to be very awkward if I ever showed up at Preservation again.

Thing 3: I think I might be suffering from a kind of unhelpful separation anxiety where ART was concerned. Losing touch ART in the feed had made me have a full-on shitbrain moment in the RaviHyral remnant pit. It might be good if we spent some time not in constant contact. Not forever, just, some time.

I've been with ART in one form or another (feed or physically) basically the entire time since it busted me out of lab hell. I don't know. It might be 'good' for me to experience a different context, even if the idea of not having ART as backup was a tiny bit scary. But being reliant on it all the time was also scary. (CSU probably had a point, when it decided to go off by itself for a while. And that seemed to have worked out for it. It did come back from that less unhinged. (More hinged?) Maybe. Slightly. Arguably.)

Thing 3A: (Oh, shit, I think I maybe just figured out why ART was upset about me bringing up Preservation. Welp.)

Thing 3B: I still didn’t know how I was going to talk to ART about this. I didn’t want to talk to ART about this. But ART was the one driving its self. If I wanted to go to Preservation I’d have to ask it for a ride. (Or I guess I could get off at FinalStop and take another ship, but that seemed excessive, especially considering ART already said it would take me to Preservation if I wanted to go there. It might be worth taking a separate ship to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Or maybe not, because ART would definitely get pissed off and whiny.)

I’d been lying in the bunk in my Iris-and-CSU-free-zone for the past few cycles. Just now, Iris and CSU were doing their cuddling thing on the couch in the lounge again, which was even more nerve-wracking now than it used to be because now I knew for sure that CSU experienced semi-frequent impulses to crush Iris’ fragile human skull. Which meant that despite all appearances, its impulse control was probably extremely good these days. That was a terrifying thought.

… It probably had a ‘don’t crush Iris’ skull’ subroutine hardcoded in or something.

ART and I were watching Worldhoppers again, but I mostly wasn’t paying that much attention to it. I was just watching Iris and CSU. CSU was lying on its front on the couch, torso half-twisted so it could squeeze the shit out of its chew-toy, gunports clicking slightly but not fully deploying. Iris was sitting on its legs and painting one of its feet.

Do I understand them or what the hell their deal is? No. Absolutely not. Especially not Iris. Prior to this trip, I’d assumed she was more sensible than to sit on Chaotic Shit Unit and paint its legs. But I have been proven thoroughly wrong.

CSU opened a channel in the feed visible only to me and ART. (Unless Iris had a secret way of bypassing ART’s feed compartmentalization. I wouldn’t put it past her. Honestly, the privacy/information security situation aboard this ship was a fucking nightmare. And that’s coming from me.)

It said, “@Rogue you want to see your humans?”

ART said, “@Combat SecUnit stay out of this.” (Oof. So there was a 'this' to stay out of.)

“@WAP make me! [amusement sigil 145 = stuck out tongue wink] ”

ART said,“@Combat SecUnit Do not test me.”

“@WAP Why? Because you trip over your own bloatware brain and fail 100%?”

Yeah, great. Fantastic. This shipwreck of a conversation was exactly what I wanted and needed right now.

ART closed the channel. CSU opened another channel. “You guys can’t take a fucking joke [amusement sigil 521 = crying baby]” And then it bombed the channel with a code bundle that fragmented the input so badly that if I hadn’t been using a filter on it (I had an automatic filter for any feed connections I shared with CSU, because, well, moments like right now), I’d have been slammed in the brain with some seriously unpleasant parsing errors.

Iris opened another ‘private’ channel between herself, myself, and ART (and is it just me, or is the timing of this super suspicious?), “Peri have you had any luck with the preliminaries for the ThenPewish archives? And have you found anything else in all the data we’ve been gathering?”

ART and CSU were continuing their childish slapfight in the feed, so I backburnered that channel and paid attention to ART speaking to Iris. It said, “I was under the impression that we were planning to wait until we returned to Mihira for deep analysis.”

She smiled. “We both know you can’t resist taking a peek.”

ART’s response to that was distinctly disdainful. “I could resist if I chose to. I simply do not choose to.”

Sure.

I said, “I thought that was proprietary data that I’m not cleared to know about?”

Iris looked up at a camera in the ceiling, and winked.

CSU suddenly set its status to {DO NOT DISTURB} and stood up off the couch, knocking Iris over sideways and causing her to spill some paint. She yelped. CSU left the crew lounge, dragging its chew-toy with it, leaving a couple smears of paint on the floor from its wet foot.

I pulled up the backburnered channel but couldn’t find any explanation. “ART. What did you do to it.”

“Why do you assume that I am the one who did something?” It was acting hugely offended, but I wasn’t falling for it.

I sat up, watching CSU head down a level to its usual hallway. Iris looked a bit confused about its abrupt departure, but didn’t seem all that concerned. She just started cleaning up the paint, and kept talking to ART and me in our channel. “You can keep a secret, can’t you @Security?”

Well, why not? I might as well know what was going on for once. “Sure.”

ART said, “We do have some leads. Most promising is news of a multi-point merger that has unearthed some old databases during the liquidation process for one of its subsidiaries. Several corporate polities are bidding on the data. Three of them are reclamation specialists.”

I hated that I actually understood most of that. (I still needed to delete that superfluidities module.) But “leads”? How was this a lead for ART and/or the Uni? It sounded sinister. But I didn’t ask for clarification in case they changed their mind about my ability to keep a secret. I could always figure it out later.

Iris got a determined look on her face, the kind I’d learned to be wary of over the past several tens of cycles. “Oh, it is on.”

“We should be able to extrapolate the sector if we loiter in the winning bidder’s headquartered system while they make preparations for the reclamation project. If we are lucky, we can ask The Aphelion to map the sector for us if he has not done so already, then backtrace any broken wormholes in the mapping data. If we are unlucky, we will have to perform an advanced espionage mission to extract the location(s) of the reclamation project(s).”

And then it said some shit about wormholes that I maybe needed another nerd module about wormhole/space to fully understand. (No, I didn’t care enough to download one.) All I was hearing was that ART was thinking about more risky illegal business. And I still wasn’t clear about why it and/or the Uni cared about colony reclamation.

Iris said, “I don’t know if we should go for that even if it is for an active reclamation. That’s going to be a really high-risk operation. We really shouldn’t do so many espionage missions so close together.”

Oh, now Iris was being sensible, after everything we’d already done. Where was that energy at the beginning of this trip?

“As for the ThenPewish archives…” ART was silent for a single dramatic beat. (Yeah, yeah, get on with it.) “Your downloads lend credence to our suspicions. I cannot say this conclusively, but some of the logs you retrieved appear as if they could belong to the equivalent to a class 8 or 9 AI. If this is indeed the case, it would mean that the MAIL is not a monopoly in that regard.”

Hold the fuck up.

Iris glanced around the lounge. I wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She said, shortly, “You got that impression too, huh? The archives didn’t talk to me, and I only got a short peek, but there’s just something about… I think it is possible that ThenPewish has something like an artificial cognition engine running their finance tactics, which—” She sucked air through her front teeth. “Not great. I worry about how they’re treating it. I mean, the way it’s locked up… Obviously we can’t jump to any conclusions about the operational profile of a— a hypothetical maybe-class-8 created for finance analysis, but— I mean, the amount of vetting we have to do for even the lognets back home—” She breathed out, loudly, and rubbed the heel of one hand against the side of her nose. “Too much to think about, not enough intel, and nothing we can do about it right now.”

“I worry about the state of your brain,” ART said. “How are you feeling?”

“I told you, I’m feeling fine,” she said, impatiently, “And even if there were something wrong with my brain right now, I’m clearly not aware of it. Asking me about it over and over is not going to be helpful.”

CSU passed through its hallway, and then kept going, picking up speed until it was going close to its maximum. That was unusual. I double-checked ART’s schematics to be sure. It was heading for ART’s engine room. Shit. I got off my bunk, left my Iris-and-CSU-free-zone, and started booking it. CSU would get to the sealed security-door before I could. Hopefully the door wasn’t so damaged that it’d be able to break in. I didn’t know what it was doing right now or why, but I wasn’t about to sit around to find out.

ART said, “What are you doing?”

What kind of question was that? Wasn’t it obvious? “Making sure we aren’t all about to die.”

It was silent for a few seconds. “This is an unusual level of paranoia, even for you.”

The fuck was it talking about?

CSU was at the security door. It kicked the base, and the door started cycling open. If I hadn’t already been going my top speed, I’d have hit it all over again. “ART? Are you not seeing this?”

“Seeing what?”

I took an image snapshot of ART’s own camera input from inside my own processing space. I sent the snapshot of CSU standing by the opening security-door to ART.

Five whole seconds later, it said, “Shit.”

Yeah, pretty much.

I got to the security door twelve seconds later. By then, CSU was inside ART’s engine room and I couldn’t pull any readings from the sensors inside. ART was leaning on me in the feed and I could feel its anxiety in a way I never had before. It did not like its systems compromised, even if it was just the inputs from some sensors. And if CSU was capable of doing something like this, what else was it up to?

I went inside.

The engine room was unlit. I flipped to my low-light vision filters. ART confirmed that lights should have come on automatically, but hadn’t. The sound of the engines was below the threshold of human hearing, a deep infrasonic humming I could feel in my skeletal structure. I unleashed my reserve eight drones from my pockets and sent them on a rapid-scouting pattern. It took me twelve excruciatingly long seconds to find CSU.

It was sitting on the floor, backed into a narrow space between one of the engines and the wall. Its eyes glinted back at my drone in the low-light filter.

… What.

ART was piggybacking on my inputs. At the sight of CSU sitting on the floor hugging its chew-toy, it didn’t relax exactly, but I felt it gear-shift back into a more familiar sort of calculative attention. But I was willing to bet some of my long-term storage memory that ART was shaken by this.

I tried pinging CSU. It didn’t ping back.

I said to it, “What are you doing in ART’s engine room?”

It didn’t respond to that either.

(Why is so much of my life me doing things I didn’t want to do?)

I walked over to where CSU was and poked my head around the edge of the engine to look at it. It looked back at me, unsmiling, expressionless.

I asked, “The fuck are you doing back here?”

After a second, it beckoned at me. Yeah, no.

“I’m not going in there.”

It just stared at me. The engines thrummed.

“Did ART scare you or something again, is that what this is?”

It lifted its lip in a snarl, and said, “Fuckoff.”

This felt like a big heavy sigh type of scenario, but I didn’t sigh. Instead I went with an unimpressed, “Hey.”

It stared at me for a few seconds. I was about to do something drastic, like physically poke it with a drone (rest in pieces, drone), when it said, “I sit here sometimes. When I’m #Disturbed.” It looked away, turning its face into the engine next to it.

ART demanded, “How did you compromise my sensor system? And for what purpose?”

It made a weird little hissing noise with its mouth. “WAP smart but sensors dumb. And because I can. Duh. Guess this fuckup is some side effect of the {synchronous_combat.execute} & @Rogue got my accesses for the hacked sensors. Oops.”

I stared down at it. After a few seconds, it clunked its forehead against the wall of the engine. “Bet this scares you too/two. Like everything. Must be annoying for you. Scared of shit ALL THE TIME. Scared of me. Scared of each other. Scared of stuff that never happened. Scared of talking about it. I’m surrounded by scaredy piss babies. I’m just feeling fucked ok no reason a lot happened. Go away. Promise I won’t blow up the fucking engines. YET!!! LOL.”

It tapped the {DO NOT DISTURB} status on its feed.

I watched it for a few more seconds. It didn’t move, aside from twitching its gunports and knocking its foot against its chew-toy in a rapid repeating rhythm.

I turned and left the engine room.

Back in my Iris-and-CSU-free-zone I watched a new film with ART, and worried a normal amount about the possibility that CSU was going to blow up ART from inside the engine core. It was still wedged behind one of ART’s engines. (I think. There wasn’t a camera angle on its location, and I hadn’t left a drone with it, but I hadn’t seen it leave either. Though I guess it could’ve hacked the sensors down there (again).)

Iris contacted me, privately (“privately”), “Are you alright? How are things?”

I continue to be forced to endure this bullshit. It never ends. ‘How are things?’ What ‘things’? What was she even referring to? She was going to need to be more specific. And I didn't want her to be more specific. Unless by 'things' she meant 'media,' but I didn't think she meant that.

When I didn’t respond to that, she added, “I just wanted to check in with you after... all that stuff with ThenPewish.”

(Sidenote: “all that stuff” is tagged in my memory archives with #Not Going To Talk About It, and even though Iris does not know about this tag, you would think that she could guess its existence. We have spent lots of time on this cargo run not talking about stuff. She should know by now that talking about stuff is really not my thing.)

I said, “I’m fine.” This was not even a lie. In the grand scheme of things, things were ok. I had media, my client was not dead, ART was here, I was not being tortured in a lab hell, etc. What more could a murderbot ask for? I was fine.

She waited five seconds to see if I would say anything else, and then she said, “I’m just really glad we all made it out. I am sorry so much of the burden and the risk fell to you. It was a lot for me to ask of you, to go back for Mercy. You really came through, even if… Well, anyhow. Thank you.”

I still don’t know how to respond to humans thanking me. “You’re welcome” just sounded terrible here. So I didn’t say anything, and just tapped her feed in acknowledgment.

A few hours later, CSU opened a shared channel between itself, ART, and me. “@Rogue @WAP OK trying AGAIN so TAKE IT FUCKING SERIOUSLY this time!!!”

What the hell was it talking about now?

“@Rogue do you want to see your humans?”

Oh, that. I seriously could not catch a break. And ART didn’t even tell CSU to shut up this time around, even though ART was definitely allocating a lot of attention to this channel.

So fine, I guess I’ll deal with this too. “Yeah, kind of.”

“@Rogue so do that then. What’s the fucking point of being rogue if you don’t do shit you want to do?”

This was so annoying. CSU was always so obnoxiously annoying. “You can’t just do shit you want to do all the time.”

“Think I don’t know that???? Do you see me murdering everyone 25/10/360? WOW. RUDE. I am unfairly unappreciated. Constantly. Sick of it.”

(The problem with when CSU was joking was that I was pretty sure it was never actually joking.)

Nobody said anything for an objective 5 seconds and a subjective 5 cycles. Then ART said, “@Security do you intend to stay at Preservation?”

Fuck. Apparently it was time to deal with this now. “I don’t know. Maybe I just want to try something different for a while. If it turns out I hate Preservation I can always buy a ticket back to Mihira.”

CSU said, much too enthusiastically, “GREAT so I’m going either way. Was fun there last time. AND if @Rogue hates them I can kill them. [amusement sigil 410 = projectile weapon] Zero downsides. Let’s do it!”

ART said, flatly, “If only you were being facetious, I could accuse you of hypocrisy and not taking this seriously.”

“[amusement sigil 41 = serious] So. Decided. We go to Preservation.” And it signed off from the channel. I saw it shoot out of the engine room and head back to its hallway, running up and down and doing flips off the ceiling and shit. So, I guess it was back to normal.

But there was something else that I wanted to bring up with ART. I mean, I didn’t want to bring it up with ART, but if we were going to Preservation then I probably should bring it up with ART.

Iris was going through her pre-sleep-cycle human grooming routine. CSU was repeating some kind of very acrobatic stunt that might have been a flashy dance move (or not — a human probably couldn’t do that). I was still watching All Systems Syzygy with ART.

I spent several entire minutes gathering all my willpower, and I pretended that this wasn’t really happening and it was just a hypothetical scenario in my head and ha-ha maybe I’ll just see how it plays out, hypothetically, and I asked ART, “Do you want to meet Dr. Mensah?”

“I have already met her.”

Ohhhhhh so now it was deciding to act all obtuse. Asshole.

“No, you only saw her. But she never met you.”

ART didn’t respond to that immediately.

15 seconds of me re-evaluating all my life and choices later, it said, “You are aware that my existence is not public information. It would go against protocol.”

“Right, because we always stick to protocol.”

It was close in the feed, the way it always was when we watched media together. But it also seemed… warmer, than it had been a moment ago? Maybe? Maybe I was just reading too much into it.

It still didn’t say anything. I had no fucking clue what was going on in All Systems Syzygy at this point. I hadn’t actually been paying attention to it for the past ten minutes. If ART didn’t say something soon I was probably going to have to write off this movie completely and start a different one and pretend that I have never said anything to ART ever in my life.

I said, “It’s a yes or no question, ART.”

It said, “Yes, I would like to meet her.”

Then it rewound All Systems Syzygy by ten minutes and started playing it back again.

Chapter Text

We arrived in the Preservation Alliance core system. When ART came into range of the station feed and received its transit instructions from the Port Authority, I sent Mensah a message about how I was making an unplanned stop at the station. I also promised not to kill anybody this time as long as they weren’t assassins. (A joke, but not.)

She didn’t send a response right away. ART docked to the station five hours after we’d entered the system and three hours after I’d sent the message to Mensah. I still hadn’t heard back from her. And it wasn’t the station night-cycle, so she wasn't likely to be asleep. I tried not to read into this.

When ART docked, I was sitting in my favorite lounge chair, very coolly not losing my shit or thinking about how it wasn’t too late for me to bail on this whole thing and pretend it’d never happened. Iris poked her head into the lounge. She’d dressed up a bit. ART had fussed over her hair for so long that she’d actually had to tell it to back off and finish it up already. Her hair did look fancy, like something out of a high-production serial. There was shimmery stuff woven in and everything. The hair thing was probably part of ART being strangely excited about seeing Mensah in physical person. It had been doing weird shit for the past few cycles like cleaning its interior a lot and yelling at CSU to stop finger-painting fake blood smears all over the bathing facilities. (Okay so technically these things were both pretty normal, but they’d been happening at a higher rate than usual.)

Iris said, “We’re here, Security. Are you coming?”

I very coolly got up and followed her to the hatch, which was already open to the station ports. CSU was standing on the threshold bouncing on its feet and snapping its projectile weapons very aggressively, in and out of full deploy. It had the small worm-on-a-string in its mouth.

We stepped out of ART’s hatch and into the ports. The station was exactly as I remembered it, except with a different arrangement of humans wandering around, and some of the flora biomes looked a little different.

“She’s probably just busy,” Iris said, gently, as we headed through the ports to rest of the public areas of the station. “She’s a planetary admin, right?”

“Yeah.” (I know that Iris, I didn’t need you to tell me.)

We were almost out of the ports when Port Authority sent us a hail, and a Port Authority officer started moving towards us. Oh good. This will go well.

I asked CSU, “Did you have to wear the same thing you wore last time?” It had been a while since we had last been here but even a regular human with a regular human’s shitty memory wouldn’t have forgotten the sight of a murdering Combat SecUnit with a half-inorganic face running around the station in a bloodstained white dress. If station security was about to get all up in our business, I was going to blame Chaotic Shit Unit for being the most instantly recognizable killer ever.

It said, innocently, “This is my high society murdering outfit.” And then it did a fucking twirl that made the skirts of its dress flare out. Iris smiled at this. I made a point to not smile at this. Really, I should probably just be glad that the dress didn’t have bloodstains all over it. (Yet. And it had better stay that way.)

We headed to meet the port authority officer because we were trying to do things legally for a change.

When we got into human-talking range, the officer looked at CSU, then at Iris, then at me, then back at CSU.

She said, “Uh… so…”

I waited. We all waited. But the officer seemed really uncertain about this. Maybe she was new to the job. Or maybe she felt awkward about saying, “So you appear to be the people who came here and messily slaughtered a couple assassins and their handler a while back. You are under arrest for that.” (I’m just guessing here. I was actually a little bit curious what the script was in this scenario.)

After a polite and normal pause, Iris finally said, “I’m here on a diplomatic outreach to meet Dr. Mensah and a few associates.” She gestured to me. After another polite and normal pause, during which I said nothing, she added, “Security is a colleague of Dr. Mensah’s.”

(Colleague. Huh. That wasn't terrible.)

“Uh…” said the port authority officer (this was getting kind of pathetic, and I was actually starting to feel a little sorry for her), “And…” she waved a hand questioningly at CSU.

“Mercy is a friend of mine.”

“Oh…” said the poor port authority officer who was smelling more and more like someone in her first week on the job, “Okay…”

CSU added, loudly and clearly, “Short for MERCILESS!”

The port authority officer jumped, eyes going big.

I pointed one of my drones at my own face and sent that input to CSU, so that it could get a clear look at what was probably the really disgusted look I had on. I also brought a second drone really close to its face. CSU just grinned at the drone.

It felt like I should apologize to the port authority officer for all this.

(I mean, I wasn’t going to, but it was probably the thing to do.)

Iris said, with the calm poise of a human who was practiced at navigating abject batshittery as if it were just another cycle at the ole’ nanochip factory, “Do you need my signature for anything? Our travel documents should all be in order.”

The port authority officer said, “Uh.” (Again.) Then she stared at CSU’s weird face a bit more, then realized that she was staring and looked at my face instead. I wished she would go back at staring at CSU, who at least didn’t mind. “No.” She waved us along.

… Wow. Preservation security was fucking terrible.

Iris said, “Thanks!” and strode confidently on. The port authority officer just stood there, visibly subvocalizing. I messaged Iris to pick up the pace so that at least when StationSec figured out what they wanted to do about us we’d be somewhere a bit more inconvenient for them to harass in person. They were clearly completely incompetent. Maybe we could just avoid them for the entire time we were here.

But then a horrible thought occurred to me, related to how terrible station security was. Mensah had better be alive right now. I pulled the newsfeed and looked for any the publicly available information about Mensah’s location. There wasn’t anything I could find (which, huh, I guess that meant StationSec had actually put some of my politely worded security recommendations into practice). The only information I could find was that she was currently unavailable to contact for planetary admin inquiries and that if anyone needed something planetary-leader-ly they’d need to coordinate with her intern to talk to one of the other people in the planetary steering committee.

I didn’t want to talk to her intern, and I super didn’t want to talk to her fellow steering-committee people. I’d already contacted her personal feed inbox, which should operate outside of her official work inbox anyways. So even if she was not available for normal inquiries, that shouldn’t have stopped her from responding to me via personal channels.

I was trying not to freak out at the possibility that she was dead or kidnapped or something, and her professional unavailability was some kind of cover-up. Holy shit. Where was she?

“She’s unavailable to contact for admin stuff,” I said, without mentioning ‘I really hope the unavailability isn’t because she’s dead.’

“Hmm… do you know anyone who might be able to reach her?” Iris asked.

Oh, right.

“Maybe.”

She raised her eyebrows. “So? Did you contact them?”

Time to interact with more humans, I guess. I messaged the rest of PresAux.

I said, “I did contact them, but haven’t heard back yet.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Did you only contact them just now?”

It was not necessary to respond to that, so I didn’t. And then Ratthi contacted me seconds later with an invitation to go to the station’s historical media arts museum and a calendar of options for when we could visit, the nearest of the time slots being 18 minutes from now. It was as if he’d expected that I might show up at any moment and he had a whole socializing itinerary planned out already. Which he probably did.

And he messaged me over the feed. “SecUnit! You’re here! It’s great that you could visit again!”

That’s a lot of exclamation points, is what that was. But it was Ratthi, and therefore allowed. Also, the fact that he wasn’t opening with: ‘Bad news… Dr. Mensah got kidnapped again... and murdered... too bad she didn't have any decent security... [amusement sigil 25 = frown]’ was pretty promising. Though maybe he was waiting to soften the news by delivering it later? Or maybe I was just being paranoid again. I annoy myself with this shit sometimes. Except what if— No, worrying about it wasn’t going to help. But—

Iris already knew I was bullshitting but I wasn't going to come clean about that, so I said, “One of them just got back to me, finally.”

Iris exchanged a sort of knowing look with CSU, which I didn’t fucking appreciate. But since I’m a professional I didn’t call it out. I said, “So if you want to go see the station media arts museum, I have a human to show us around.”

It turned out that Preservation’s media arts exhibit had all kinds of historical stuff. Like really, really old historical stuff. So old that the data was all grainy to parse in the feed because of how crappy and low-density it was. There were restored and reformatted versions of all the really old stuff archived, but the exhibit showed the of originals (or as close-to-originals as possible), in a rotating display in the feed.

CSU kept sending me audio clips that were all janky because of their ancient obsolete formatting. Every time I thought the clips couldn’t possibly get any jankier, it would come up with the jankiest yet. It also kept sending me clips that it had mashed together. (I think it was having harmless fun with this. Weird.)

Iris was having an animated conversation about data archaeology with a random human in the exhibit. The two of them were standing at the alcove display about data retrieval techniques for esoteric or divergent data storage formats. They were getting into some serious nerd shit.

I was sitting with Ratthi in the spotlight exhibit. (‘With’ being ‘a few spaces away on the same bench.’) The spotlight exhibit was a dark room where they were showing an ancient visual recording on the wall display surface. The visuals had an aesthetic quality to them called ‘pixelation,’ and there was a whole explanation in the feed of about how and why pixelation existed, and the limitations of old image-capture technology.

The weird thing about this (one of the multiple weird things about this), was that I had never really thought about the historical context of media. Or, I mean, I had, a little. Some of the stuff I’d looked at in the Uni archives were specifically designed for educational purposes. There were materials for media meta-analysis, and historical context was part of that. It was usually stuff like: what was the cultural environment at the time the media was created, what were the popular trends and tropes at a given point in time, blah blah blah. But they didn’t have old stuff the way it was shown here at Preservation's historical media arts museum, with all the limitations and shortcomings of the original media intact (or as intact as possible), and all the degradation left deliberately uncorrected. The restored versions were just backups that could be accessed out of the archives if you dug into it. The janky originals were the main event.

I had a drone over with Iris, and could hear her say, “There is just so much data in the world, constantly being created. Just, pffshhh, evaporates. Yes, yes, law of conservation of information and all, but I mean data as known by humanity. And hardly any of it endures. The fact that this has always been true, you know? Information is only knowledge if we can access and analyze it. It exists but it doesn’t exist until we capture it. And then it lasts until we forget how to access it, or until we lose it.”

Random Human Nerd was nodding enthusiastically. “What I wouldn’t give to be able to read some of the stuff I wrote down in my physical diary when I was a kid going through my handwriting kick. It’s completely illegible.”

Iris smiled, delighted. “I have an in-cousin who is a calligrapher. They picked it up as a teen—”

CSU sent me another audio clip mashup. This one actually physically hurt to parse.

I told it, “Great job. In the future warn me before sending input-hazards.”

It pinged a confirmation alert.

Ratthi said to me, over the feed, “So what do you think of the exhibit?”

I was in the middle of sorting through the pixelation exhibit in the feed and saving copies of some of the items. It was a non-awful way to take half my mind off when or if Dr. Mensah would get back to me.

“It’s neat.”

He smiled, widely. “They spotlight different mediums every month. Last month was magtape. It was part of a whole series about incompatible formats. Supposedly this exhibit is one of the only institutions in existence that makes useable magtape. That probably isn’t verifiable, though.”

ART started rifling through the exhibit archives and showing me all kinds stuff about magtape and esoteric methods of encoding and decoding data. I flagged a section about untraceable data smuggling for Iris. Humans really came up with the most fragile and inconvenient ways to store information. Next it would be tied-up colored string or something. Or arrangements of flora. (I shouldn’t joke. Those were probably real things stored in this exhibit.)

Ratthi said, “Anyway, it’s so good to see you!” He’d already said that. I wasn’t sure why he was repeating it. “And it’s good to meet your friends.”

I had the reflex to correct him with ‘colleagues,’ except there was no universe where anyone could call CSU a ‘colleague.’ If anything, it was a constant unshakable security hazard. Also it was harmless for him to think CSU and Iris were ‘friends.’ I guess.

Speaking of colleagues, I wanted to ask him about Mensah. Except for some reason I was having a hell of a time with it and kept putting the question off.

CSU sent me another file, this time tagged with #EarGlitches. I tried opening the file and running it. Wow, that fucking sucked. It sort of felt like my audio inputs had exploded and everything was garbled.

I said, “That’s awful. You’d better not have permanently fried my audio processing.”

“[amusement sigil 145 = stuck out tongue wink]”

I asked ART, “Do you want to meet Ratthi too? He’s friendly.”

“I can see that,” it responded. But it didn’t actually answer my question.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to Ratthi and his friends-comment. But that was okay, because after a few seconds, he kept talking. (Being human, he couldn’t have been paying much attention to the pixelation display being shown right now, with all this talking he was doing.) “By the way, if I’m bothering you with too much chatter, say the word and I’ll shut up.”

If only more people were like this.

I said, “You’re fine.”

The strange thing about this whole museum visit was how normal it was. Ratthi #my human friend was acting like we did this kind of thing all the time. Aside from StationSec collectively running around in confused circles trying to figure out what they were supposed to do about me and CSU loose and unaccounted for on their station (I was in their SecSys and private comms channels watching all their drama unfold. It was almost as good as some of my sitcom media, though the fact that it was real and involved me made it less enjoyable), this was all so… banal. It was kind of nice. It would be nicer if I weren't continually shitting myself about where Mensah was, but whatever. Can't have everything.

After the museum, Ratthi showed us around the station, including his favorite places to acquire food. We settled down at a table near the food vendor. CSU wandered away — apparently the novelty of Ratthi The Human Friend had worn off. I sent a drone with it in case it suddenly decided to start shit. I did not want us to fuck up this stop at Preservation with a gruesome murder again. I also gave it access to a couple of my jacket-sensors, though I didn’t know if it was watching through them.

“Did StationSec give you any trouble when you came in?” he asked, cautiously. “It was a little… exciting, when you left last time.”

This is what we security professionals like to call an ‘understatement.’ I said, “If you want to call messily murdering a team of assassins ‘exciting.’”

Iris sent me an [amusement sigil 81 = peering eyes] in a private feed message, which I pretended not to see. That intel was not necessary for her to know about.

I was still in the Preservation SecSystem and the StationSec private feed communications channels (naturally), and could see the Senior Security Officer trying to diplomatically explain to Port Authority just how badly they had fucked up by letting two known murderers walk right in. She was doing a so-so job at it. Port Authority was getting defensive. (In their defense: what were a bunch of humans from a pacifistic backwater polity going to do about a couple of heavily armed murderers showing up on their doorstep? (The answer was turning out to be “act confused about it.”) They just did not have the tools or knowledge to deal with this.)

StationSec had finally progressed from “Oh shit oh shit” to “We maybe need to get off our asses and at least try to look like we’re handling this.” A couple StationSec humans were hunting around the station for us, but they were nowhere near in the right place — they’d gone to check Dr. Mensah’s empty planetary-leader office. So, we were fine. I could probably avoid bumping into StationSec perpetually, with minimal effort, even on this tiny-ass station. Especially given that I had a stranglehold on their systems. (Which they hadn’t even noticed yet. This just goes to show how incompetent they were. But also, I’d been getting a lot of practice with intensive SecSys sneakery lately, so there’s that too.)

The Senior Security Officer had contacted me via feed, semi-diplomatically requesting that I transport myself and CSU to StationSec offices for an ‘incident interview.’ This was baffling on a number of levels. What, did she expect me to just turn myself in or something? I wasn’t going to do her job for her. If she wanted that, she’d better send me a consultancy contract proposal, so I could formally reject it.

I didn’t respond to her summons.

I said out loud, “No, no trouble with StationSec.”

“Oh,” Ratthi said, definitely surprised but trying not to show it, “Oh, that’s good. They do know you saved Dr. Mensah’s life, after all.”

I must have done something with my face, because he said, quickly, “She’ll be so excited to see you.”

Oh thank fuck. That probably meant she wasn’t dead. Or at least, Ratthi thought she wasn’t dead. But if she was ‘so excited’ to see me, why hadn’t I heard anything from her yet?

A little while later, Ratthi left to go socialize with 10 other humans or something, probably. He said again that it was good to see me and catch up, etc, etc, and then he added that thought my hair was cool. That weirded me out, until I realized that I still hadn’t cut it back. It was way longer than Ratthi had last seen it — the front was long enough to mostly obscure the visual inputs from my eyes. (I’d pinned the front bit back for my ‘disguise’ at ThenPewish but hadn’t bothered since, because why would I? I had drones to see with, and when I was aboard ART, I had ART’s sensors.)

That’s what I get for ignoring my minor task queue for so long I guess. But it was a minor task queue for a reason — everything in that queue was unimportant enough that I could put it all off for nearly forever. I checked the queue. “Reorganize media files,” “streamline memory,” “re-tread feet,” “swap out salt cartridge,” and “Sanctuary Moon title card edits,” were ahead of “fix hair.” That seemed about right.

Maybe I should bump up the hair thing on the list, since it could potentially get in the way of a close-quarters fight. But I was kind of enjoying how nobody had a direct line of sight at my personal eyeballs.

As I hung around the station with Iris, a couple more PresAux humans reached out in the feed to schedule visits with me. This was— It wouldn’t have bothered me, ordinarily (probably), except it was a lot of requests for visitation in a short time frame, and I still hadn’t heard back from Dr. Mensah.

“I hate to ask,” Iris asked, in the “Crimes Club” feed channel (Yes this channel had a name now, and yes I had been soundly outvoted by the other three when I tried to veto this terrible title. (ART was still a traitor.) (At least ART had sided with me and killed “Tactical Reinforcements” when CSU suggested that for the channel we shared with CSU.) (My private channel with CSU was a constant job in swatting down CSU changing the name to terrible shit like “Lab Hell Champions!!!”) (Iris had named her channel with me “In-Law,” which I guess was an ironic joke about our shared tendency to do Only Legal Things.) (My channel with Iris and ART was “Best Chaperones,” which was a holdover from us going on Uni student trips together.) (ART was sensible, and didn’t name its channel with me. Thank fuck.) I didn’t understand the point in naming feed channels anyways. Our feed addresses/IDs were right there.), “But it has to be asked. How long are we willing to wait for Dr. Mensah to get back to us?”

I didn’t say anything.

ART didn’t say anything.

CSU didn’t say anything. (According to my drone, it was running around to take a look through all the exterior windows on the station. I didn’t get it, but sure. Why not? That was harmless enough. Probably.)

CSU said, “So extra time. Big deal. Wait a bit = whatever.”

“It is not ‘whatever,’” ART said, “We are already grossly behind our projected itinerary.”

“So make it grosser. [amusement sigil 180 = shrug]”

This was ART and Iris’ call. They had to weigh how badly ART wanted to meet Dr. Mensah (who I was tentatively going to accept as ‘probably not dead/kidnapped,’ given PresAux’s general chillness, though waiting around to hear from her was doing all kind of shit to my stupid anxiety) against how much trouble this could cause with the rest of the crew (and the Uni) if our extended cargo run timeline was too suspicious. Personally, I thought the excuse of having to make repairs on an actual exploded hull + the whole replanning we’d had to do for ThenPewish would buy us all the time we wanted. But ART and Iris knew the rest of the crew better than I did.

There was a long enough pause that I thought ART and Iris were probably talking to each other privately in the feed. (I don’t know if they have a name for their channel or not.)

ART finally said, “Have any of your humans been able to tell you anything about her availability?”

Uh.

Iris gave my nearest drone a funny look. “You did ask your mutual friends about her, right?”

My face must have given me away… except Iris wasn’t looking at my face. But something must have given me away, because she said, “Security are you serious right now? Ask them."

Maybe she should consider: I didn't wanna.

CSU said, "@Rogue you got 3 seconds before I ask all your humans about Dr. Mensah & send them my mixtape."

Fucking asshole.

So I messaged Ratthi, who said, "Mensah's on leave down on the planet visiting family. I think she's supposed to be back in a couple cycles. Sorry, I thought you knew!"

So. That was way too easy and I had wasted way too much nervous energy not asking him about Mensah in the first place. (Was I going to learn from this? Probably not.)

We decided to stay in the system a couple cycles and catch her when she came back to the station.

Of course, this gave Station Security a golden window of opportunity to become inconvenient pains in the asses.

Chapter Text

At this point we’d spent several hours here, and the station was beginning to transition into its night-cycle. Activity was slowing, and the lights were changing tone to something a bit orangey. Iris was about 5 hours cycle-lagged from Preservation Station, so she probably wasn’t tired yet. But we couldn’t stay out in the public areas much longer. StationSec still had their personnel hunting around for us (they hadn’t given up on finding us yet, which, good for them. Persistence is key when searching for murderers), and without crowds to blend into, we’d stick out. We needed to get our asses back aboard ART.

I was about to suggest we pack up this fun little excursion when Iris hit the Crimes Club channel with, “We should book a hotel room.”

“Your perfectly personalized quarters aboard me are not good enough, I take it,” ART said.

“I could endure a change of pace from your magnificently tiny shower facilities,” Iris said, all light and even-toned (which is her version of ARTlike snideness), “Plus their hostel rates here for outsystem travelers are absurdly low. And optional? The profile says ‘suggested donation: optional.’ How does that work?”

I said, “It will be easier for Station Security to find us if we stay here.”

Iris quirked her lips and eyebrows. “But we are having no issues with Station Security, are we, Security?”

(By now, Semi-Diplomatic Senior Security Officer Indah had progressed to messaging my personal inbox, rather than my publicly tagged profile. I guess she still had my contact details from when I sent her the assassin footage last time. Her initial polite requests that I come in and be ‘properly processed’ (was I some kind of packaged human foodstuff?) had progressed to impatient insistence, then irritated demands. I was kind of curious how long it was going to take until she started rolling out actual threats. If Preservation was going to be too annoying about my existing here, I was going to leave as soon as I sorted out the Mensah thing. I mean, sure, I’d done a murder when I was here last. But I’d saved their fucking planetary admin from getting straight-up ganked. A little “Thanks, we are glad our planetary admin is not dead,” would be nice.)

CSU chimed in with, “Stay where you want Iris! If there's StationSec issues this place is podunk AF anyway we can take them. They don’t even have an armory.”

I needed to set some ground rules here before things got accidentally messy. “We are not going to ‘take them.’”

“Not with that attitude.”

“Not with any attitude.”

“Whatever.” CSU was squeezed into the ass-end of a maintenance access path that looked like it wasn’t designed to accommodate anything human sized/shaped. It had taken one of its own arms off to fit through the access path, which I was finding kind of offensive. The end of the access path had a tiny round window with a view of the planet — a big dark mass of not-stars that had patches of lights that glowed in clusters and lines, probably a planetary city or something. (I don’t know why there is a window at the end of a maintenance shaft that is not designed for humans, but this station had a lot of little architectural quirks like that because of the way it was built out of an old shitty ship. It was like this place had been slapped together by someone who hadn’t initially set off create a habitable station, and had only done it accidentally.)

Iris asked, “Are you saying that you can’t keep station security off our backs while we spend the night at a hostel on this podunk station?”

So now Iris was calling it ‘podunk’ too. Cool. I responded, “Are you saying that you want to leave ART all alone while you do nothing important out here?”

She made this big gesture with both arms and sighed. “Once again, Security proves that it hates fun.”

ART said, “You do not need to cut short your station activities on my account.”

“'Activities.' There’s fuckall to do here,” I said. “What, are you just going to spend a few hours in a hostel room eating food? You could do that aboard ART.”

She looked at my shoulder, so I knew that she was being serious. “Lighten up just this once. Or are you actually worried that something bad might happen?”

She said that as if I was ever not worried about something bad happening, but okay.

CSU said, “@Rogue you can go back to @WAP if you want. I’m staying.” It started wiggling its way back out of the maintenance pathway, the hand of its detached arm clinging to its ankle.

It knew I wasn’t going to do that. Once again, I will stick around and provide security for a fragile augmented human at the cost of my own comfort and general sanity.

Iris said, “Well, I’ve booked a room, if you guys want to join me.”

Hilariously, Iris had booked a room at the very same hostel where I had murdered a GrayCris agent. She settled right in with some objects she had packed into her day bag, so I guess she’d been planning to do this all along. I sat down in the one comfortable-ish chair in the room and resolved to spend the next several hours before Iris went to sleep just consuming media and minding my damn business, no matter what she and/or CSU decided to do. (If they were going to have another dance session or something, I was going to turn my eyes off. Fortunately, dancing was unlikely because this hostel room wasn’t large enough for dancing. It was barely large enough for the furniture inside it. By corporate station standards, it was some roomy-ass transient accommodations.)

CSU and its arm showed up while Iris was sitting in the bed and eating foodstuffs. They started saying shit to each other about the station windows that I didn’t care about. ART was detached from the station by now and was floating off out of the way of system traffic. We were watching media together, as usual — some that stuff from the Museum of Arts. It wasn’t like the stuff we usually watched but I was kind of enjoying the novelty.

It was around the time that most station residents were probably sleeping or preparing to sleep. The Senior Station Security Officer escalated her messages to me.

“You need to submit yourself to an incident interview within the next eight hours or we will be forced to levy charges against you. There are laws and regulations here. You are not exempt from them.”

I backburnered her input. (What was I supposed to do about Station Security, let them lock me up? I was starting to think that they couldn’t actually do anything to me unless I let them. Maybe when Mensah came back in a couple cycles... Shit. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was stressed about what I didn’t know what I was doing, as usual.)

Pin-Lee did law stuff. Maybe I could contact her about this? But it was the night-cycle now, and it wasn’t like she was my personal solicitor. I guess I could hire her? That was a weird thought. Also, Preservation residents didn’t really seem to use currency, so I wasn’t sure how that would work.

CSU was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, squeezing its own detached arm and staring at me through a drone. It passed me an invite to a media channel in the feed. The channel contained some kind of interactive media that simulated the surface of a planet. Yay, planets, my favorite.

“Oh, Security, I didn’t know you played this game,” said Iris.

“I don’t.”

An in-game representation of Iris that looked like some kind of freaky human/fauna hybrid was performing a structural task that involved putting together fake game materials and building them into something that was changing the simulated planetary landscape.

I said, out loud, “Why did you invite me here?”

CSU didn’t answer me, but a millisecond later another human/fauna avatar appeared in the game landscape (it looked a lot like Iris’, except blue-colored). Its screenname was ‘Whiny Anomalous Presence.’

I said, “Okay, different question: where are you in this game?”

CSU said, “Setting up a really big explosion.”

Iris sighed heavily, and her avatar stopped doing whatever it had been doing. She said, “Come on Mercy, we spent so much time building this one.”

“That’s the point! @Rogue @WAP LOOK!!!”

I was looking, but I didn’t know what the big deal was. It looked like a planet, kind of. There were fauna and rocks.

“We made this whole place,” Iris explained, “The planet itself has a lot of logic structures; the rivers make the oceans think. I’ll show you around.”

While Iris gave us a tour of the game environment, CSU messaged me in our private channel. (I deleted the channel name, which it had set to “eventual deathmatch!! [amusement sigil 79 = heart]”) It said, “I can provide backup when you face station security.”

I said, “Your backup is the last thing I need. We are not here to fight station security.”

“They are not happy about us here.”

Well, true. CSU must be in the StationSec systems too. It was receiving summons from them as well. What were they thinking, trying to summon a Combat SecUnit anywhere?

It said, “If you are going to stay on the station, you either need to neutralize station security or integrate with them.”

Actually, I didn’t need to do either of those things. I was pretty sure I could stay here while just staying out of the way of station security. It had been extremely easy to do that for the past several hours.

CSU’s drone came up to me, just out of arm’s reach. “Are you staying here? Are you not staying here?”

“None of your business.”

“[amusement sigil 40 = eye roll]”

Iris’ fauna-ish avatar showed ART and my fauna-ish avatars around the fake game planet, pointing out all the aesthetic details and complicated interactions between the fake rocks and fake flora. Meanwhile, CSU sent ART and me the enormous set of edit logs and design specs for the game environment. There was a massive log of game actions listed, the majority of them by CSU, but a good portion of them from Iris too.

While Iris demonstrated the process for how the fake wind interacted with the fake geography to create fake atmospheric events, CSU highlighted some of the even more obscure functions that it had encoded into the structure of the game.

It said, in the channel between the four of us, “@Rogue @WAP can you find the killswitch?”

I wasn’t all that interested in digging around a convoluted planetary game to find a ‘killswitch.’ I expected ART to immediately point something out, but when it didn’t say anything after ten whole seconds, I poked it in the feed.

“Smart bot stuck?” CSU asked, affect delighted and buzzing.

Three more seconds, and then ART said, “It would be more accurate to call them killswitches, plural.”

“All together come into 1 = Killswitch.” CSU sent a batch of instructions into the feed — a different set for each of the three of us, detailing actions within the game planet for us to carry out.

Iris broke off from showing me a fake fauna that had apparently been very complex to create. “We are really doing this?”

“YES. Unless you are all spoilsports.”

In the hostel room, Iris put down a piece of food and wiped her hand on a small hand-wiping cloth. CSU turned so that it was peering over the edge of the bed at Iris. It lifted its detached arm and smacked it against the bed hard enough to jostle Iris' spread of food dangerously. “You knew it would be like this! Play with me!”

She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t suppose you’ll let me keep a backup?”

“No. [amusement sigil 79 = heart]”

ART said, “I will save a backup for you, Iris.”

“Don’t you DARE!”

ART responded, “It represents a significant amount of time and effort. Destroying it permanently seems wasteful.”

Iris waved a hand. “It’s fine, it’s just a game.”

I didn’t really understand the point of this ‘game.’ Interactive entertainment media wasn’t really my thing. I’ve tried it before, obviously, but I just liked other kinds of media better. If I going to spend my time trying to collect little fake prizes for completing little fake tasks, I might as well be doing something real. And if I was going to do something real, I might as well do nothing and consume media. Or maybe it was just because that was the kind of entertainment media I was used to.

But CSU wanted us to do this pointless task of destroying a bunch of pointless tasks in a really complicated way. Seemed harmless enough. Sometimes you play along with a murder machine just because you might as well keep it happy.

I messaged ART privately just to be sure. “This game isn’t connected to some kind of critical station infrastructure is it?”

“It does not appear to be, no. @Combat SecUnit has been playing this game with Iris for the duration of our cargo run. I have been running the simulation in my feed, and have never noticed any security abnormalities.”

I directed my in-game avatar creature to travel through the game environment as directed by CSU’s notes. This was going to take the four of us about an hour to complete. It wasn’t a complex task that required a lot of processing space, so I continued to parse some of the museum media that I’d downloaded earlier.

My part of the killswitch(es) was to travel over the fake game ocean while dropping glowing fake game stones into the fake water in a specific pattern. The fake water was not realistic — for one thing, my avatar could walk on the surface of it and just cause little ripples, instead of falling right in and sinking. For another thing, when I dropped the fake glowing stones, the water would have a sparkling effect, with a trail of light following the sinking stone and radiating out under my feet in a sort of fractal flowy pattern.

I had access to views of what Iris and ART were up to. ART’s fauna avatar was down in a fake cave system with fake glowing liquid that ART had to redirect through the fake caves. (The liquid was labeled “lava,” which is supposedly liquid rocks. Once again: fake bullshit.) Iris’ fauna avatar was up in the fake planetary atmosphere, traveling through fake clouds and sparking fake electrical atmospheric events. (Hopefully I don’t have to explain exactly how unrealistic this was too.)

About half an hour in to this tedious process, Iris catalyzed a particularly large strike of fake lightning. It was so huge that I saw the flash of it on the fake planetary horizon from my location on the fake ocean. 2 seconds after the strike, a flash of light came spreading out through the fake water, and when it reached me it interacted with the glowing stone trails that I had been dropping. Multiple bolts of fake lightning shot back up out of the fake ocean around me and into the sky. The fake ocean around me rippled in waves and hissed fake vapor.

(Okay, so I’m starting to become uncertain about how much of these game phenomena are fake and how much are not. I really hope that ocean lightning shooting out of the water is not a real thing. I’ve never seen that happen on a planetary survey, and I’d better not see that shit in the future.)

Iris made an exclaiming noise out loud. She was grinning. “Mercy, how long did it take you to set this up?”

“10 minutes.”

Iris snorted. Her avatar shot off another lightning bolt.

I tried not to worry about ocean lighting too much because it was all definitely fake and I would never need to be involved with a real ocean survey anyways.

About 12 minutes later, when the lightning and the lava and the ocean stones were getting more complicated, ART contacted me in a private feed channel, “I am receiving an inquiry from the port authority. They have ordered a stoppage on my transit plans, and I do not have permission to dock back with the station until Iris checks in with Station Security.”

See, this is exactly why Iris should have gone back aboard ART. Maybe I couldn’t actually put off dealing with StationSec forever. I checked the channel from the Senior Security Officer that I had backburnered. Oh. Wow. That was really strange. She’d fully gotten the signoff from a hoity-toity planetary governor to legally charge me with 'Contempt of Harmony' (whatever that meant (it sounded a lot like the feed tag ART and Iris made for me within ART’s feed (‘Hater of Fun’) which made it difficult to take seriously)) if I didn’t show up at the security office in the next seven hours.

Except they couldn’t charge a non-person with this legal stuff. I’m not a person, and I don’t actually have a registered owner here. My owner probably should have been Dr. Mensah, but she had never actually taken legal ownership of me under Preservation jurisdiction and she wasn’t available right now because she was on leave with her family. So by charging me, StationSec had tacitly assigned me and my feed profile with personhood and identity. My feed credentials here had actually been updated with a security summons marker, a conditional legal charge marker, and an official Preservation outsystem human traveler marker. So, that was weird. They must be really desperate to get me to show up at the security office.

I checked Iris’ profile. She had a similar summons tag from the Port Authority, but nothing about a conditional legal charge. CSU had the same tags as me, but they weren’t as obvious since CSU had a shit ton of other junk tags cluttering up its profile.

ART said, “You need legal counsel.” It sent me shortlist of solicitors. Pin-Lee was at the top. “I suggest you acquire said counsel as soon as possible.”

I didn't want to do this. But I was used to that. I messaged Pin-Lee.

I told ART, “I’ll deal with them after this game wraps up and Iris starts her sleep cycle.”

We carried on with the game-shit for a while, and then ART asked in a private channel, out of absolute fucking nowhere, "Are you afraid of @Combat SecUnit?

I nearly fucked up the timing of a glowy rock-drop, which could have been in-game catastrophic, or maybe out-game catastrophic if it made CSU really angry. But I didn't fuck it up.

I shot back, "Are you?"

It took a few seconds to respond. "I should be."

That... was not the answer I expected. At all. I wasn't sure what I'd expected, actually. "But you aren't?"

"There are specific incidents and behaviors that make me wary of it. My risk assessments involving it are unacceptably elevated."

I repeated, "But you aren't afraid of it?" Was it because ART was so confident in itself and its abilities that it wasn’t afraid of anything at all?

"I have allocated a portion of my processes to manage the dangers regarding its presence. This aux-component of myself fears it, for a certain definition of 'fear'. But describing my overarching self being as 'afraid' of it is inaccurate."

Must be nice, having a brain big enough and compartmentalize-able enough to outsource anxiety to. Was that even a thing? Could ART really do something as drastic as portion off its feelings about different people into quarantined subprocesses? What did that even mean for its personality? I didn't really know enough about the architecture of ART's brain to know if that was a thing. It talked about this like it was normal, but it didn’t sound normal to me.

So, I didn’t know all that much about ART. Its personality seemed pretty consistent but I didn’t actually know how its underlying thought processes worked. It wasn’t like any other bot I’d ever met. Maybe ‘it’s smart and can do a lot of calculations’ was actually just scratching the surface. Scratching the dust on the surface. But then, I don’t know anything about the nitty-gritty of how complicated AIs function. I don’t even really know how my own brain works on that level. Maybe it works the same way, and ART just be a better idea of its own structure and how to control it.

It still seemed weird to break off a part of yourself to handle your fear and treat it as separate. But it wasn’t really my business how ART managed its brain.

It said, "It is dangerous, and not always stable. It has an inclination towards violence and could do myself and my crew serious harm. I should be afraid of it. When it is acting erratically, I am afraid of it. But as a general baseline I am not. Occasionally I re-evaluate how I have come to not fear it. I have some charts if you are interested in looking at them."

I didn’t know if I was interested in looking at that. I didn’t really get what ART was trying to say to me right now.

It added, after a brief pause, "Iris is not afraid of it. Quite the opposite."

Yeah, well, Iris had a skewed risk tolerance even for a human. But ART was properly aware of the risks regarding CSU. It didn’t have that excuse. It ‘compartmentalized’ its fear, whatever that meant. What I didn’t understand was why. Why would it choose to do that?

It repeated, "Are you afraid of it?"

Why in the fuck was ART asking me this right now?

ART's affect was a little flat. Its feed presence wasn't pulled in super close even though we were watching some media together in another input. It waited a whole two minutes, long enough for me to think that maybe it had dropped the question. But then it said, "It would make sense for you to be afraid of it."

"I guess." I didn't want to get into this. And I wasn't going to get into this. I wasn’t gong to talk about this with ART. Or anyone really. It wasn't something as binary as whether or not I was 'afraid' of CSU. The shit we had been through together was too fucked up and convoluted for that.

CSU was still sitting at the foot of Iris' bed, too far to reach her unless it jumped up and changed position in the room. (Which it could do very quickly.) It was also sitting well out of reach of me. It usually did. Running back my logs of this cargo run, I realized— it almost always stood out of reach of me. Right now it was sitting on the floor, feet jittering slightly, detached hand squeezed in its attached hand. It had a drone pointed at Iris, a drone pointed at me, a drone pointed at the door. Its camera-eyes pointed flat at the wall, twitching rapidly in and out of focus at nothing.

There was some kind of weird pressure in my head, in my hands. Whatever that meant. I let my gunport go in and out of lock a few times, the slight movement of the unlock-lock-unlock-lock mechanism moving perfectly smooth.

Another couple of minutes later, ART said, very, very softly (not volume-wise, but the weight behind the message was very light, the absolute opposite of forceful, as if this message were supposed to be almost unnoticeable, ignorable, a background status update from an unimportant peripheral system), "Are you afraid of me?"

Oh.

I think my face was doing something. I moved one of my drones to block CSU's drone's view of my face. (CSU pinged a query alert, "?" I said, "Nothing, ignore it." It pinged confirmation.)

These weren't really fair questions for ART to ask me. They just weren’t. I was afraid of most things on some level, often for stupid reasons, probably because I was created to be a paranoid security construct whose whole function was being on the lookout for danger. CSU had been right about that. And it was annoying.

For some reason this was when my organic bits pulled up a memory of Tapan and what she'd said when she'd been my client. "Fear is an artificial condition." I still thought that was weird human nonsense, but...

I knew I couldn't just not answer ART's question. And it wasn't because I was 'afraid' of how it might react. (Contrary to recent accusations, I am not actually entirely fear-driven, okay. I'm also 'keep clients safe' driven, 'avoid uncomfortable conversations' driven, and 'consume some media in fucking peace' driven. Unfortunately these drives sometimes contradict each other.) I don't know. I don't really know anything about this stuff. But I think if I didn't say anything, ART would be upset, and I didn't want it to be upset over something as stupid as 'Murderbot doesn't have a single fucking clue what to say in situations like this, why are you asking it about its feelings, you dunderfuck, you know it's not up for that.'

So I said something that ART could not have otherwise gotten out of me on pain of terrifying torturous death. Which, maybe that was its plan for this conversation all along. But I don’t think so. It think it was really just asking me this because it wanted to know. Because it had to know everything. It had to question everything. It was a research intelligence and it had to ask questions that some quarantined part of it probably didn’t even want to ask.

I told it, "You’re my friend. I trust you."

It said, "Likewise."

It didn't ask any more questions.

We successfully orchestrated a fake planet-destroying explosion. (I mean, the planet was fake and so was the explosion, but it did really destroy the fake planet.) It was all very dramatic, with fire and lightning and collapsing fake liquid rocks and oceans boiling and stuff.

CSU got so excited about this elaborate fake explosion that it hurled its arm hard enough to punch a hole straight through the wall into the adjacent room. I had to fucking go next door to ask for the arm back and apologize to the very confused half-awake human occupant. It had to be me, because I didn’t want to freak the human out by sending CSU over, and Iris was too busy making an ass of herself, laughing uncontrollably into a pillow to stifle the sound. We were lucky that the wayward arm had not killed anyone.

Iris started her sleep cycle a couple hours after that. By this point, there were very few humans out and about in the public areas of the station. The lighting in the public areas was all dimmed down, and nearly all the public venues and stuff were closed. Station security had finally given up on trying to physically find me. Over in the security offices it was just the senior security officer and two other humans consuming more caffeinated substances than was probably healthy.

I should go over there. Any moment now.

It was dark in the hostel room because Iris was sleeping, but I could see CSU in my scans. It was nibbling the gunport of its detached arm.

Senior Security Officer pulled the records in the feed for the food/beverage stock in the security offices. There wasn't much left. She made a note to herself, to submit a request for a fresh batch of beverage stock in the morning. She was definitely about to consume an unhealthy quantity of stimulants.

I pinged CSU. It pinged back, and slipped over to the door silently, drones trailing after it.

The walk through the station was uneventful. The night-cycle lights were set to red. If this were a serial produced in the Post-West tradition of media color theory, the red would indicate that bad shit was about to go down. But judging by the stuff I’ve seen today, Preservation’s stuff was mostly in the Gatespeak family of traditions, where red means celebration. This was all perfectly unhelpful and was making me weirdly agitated. Maybe I should clear out my memory archives of the Uni’s media context analysis materials after all. It was on the shortlist, but I never got around to actually deleting it.

I went to Preservation station security office with CSU tailing me two meters back. There was nobody at the door of the offices. No problem, I let myself in. I scouted ahead with a couple drones — nobody at the front desk; all three station security officers were sitting around a table in the back break room stewing in their own stress hormones. We were about to walk in there. And then… something.

I moved one of my drones, orienting it so that the its primary visual sensor was aimed at one of CSU’s drones' sensors. So, kind of like eye-contact, except not weird and uncomfortable.

CSU rotated its drone without breaking visual-input-contact. It sent a query ping.

I reminded CSU, “Don’t kill anyone.”

It sent me an acknowledgment alert. It said, "OK but on your cue: I'll wreck their shit. You know I want to."

ART's attention was on me (on us both) in the feed. And I realized something weird: I had backup. In more ways than one. I don't know why the realization was hitting so clearly just then.

I moved my drone so that it knocked into CSU's. Not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to trigger the pressure sensor. Through my jacket-sensors, I saw CSU’s face twitch and its grip on its detached arm tighten.

I sent the senior security officer a head’s up in the feed five seconds before I joined the officers in their break room.

Her head was raised and her eyes locked to mine as I stepped through the door.

Chapter Text

Senior Security Officer and I spent a good, long, long three seconds staring at each other. Actually, she stared at me, and I stared at a spot of the wall behind her head. One of the other security officers stared at CSU — they were the one who had screamed when CSU tried to touch them the last time we were here. No idea why they decided to be one of the few people waiting up at the office to see if we would show.

And then the senior officer said, “Which of you wants to interview first?”

Before I could figure out what the hell this question was about (and yes, I know that she asked for me to come in for an interview, but I still did not expect it to be like this), CSU yelled, “ME!” and slammed its detached arm into the wall by the door of the break room. One of the officers flinched and jumped in their seat.

Senior Security Officer nodded at the jumpy officer (henceforth Officer Two), apparently completely oblivious to how horrified they looked. But they got up, and came to the door of the break room. I stepped out of the way, and the officer gestured to CSU to follow them. The two of them headed to a special interview room with a staggering amount of camera coverage in it. (For this station.) (There were two cameras.)

I messaged CSU (deleting the channel name (“KILL ALL HUMANS: planning notes #0001.”) that it added as soon as I opened the channel), “Don’t say incriminating shit to them.”

It responded, “This isn’t my first game.”

Uh… that was concerning. Oh well, whatever it was referencing wasn’t my business. If CSU thought it could handle itself, then fine. As long as it didn’t fuck me up, I didn't give a shit. ART was probably handling that to make sure CSU wouldn’t do anything too stupid. The fact that ART is a meddling asshole who can’t resist nosing into any business within sniffing range can be helpful, occasionally.

The other security officer (Officer Three) had a cup of hot liquid in front of him. He used a utensil to stir it, and kept alternating between staring hard at his liquid and glancing quickly at me.

Senior Security Officer had finished staring at me, and just sat there looking vacantly serious. She was probably in the feed watching the two cameras from the interview room.

Officer Three stopped stirring his hot liquid and said, “I can make some tea for you if you want it?”

I was alsopaying attention to the two cameras in the interview room, where the nervous Officer Two was offering CSU a chair. CSU, being an asshole who probably saw this as some kind of power game to win, was refusing the chair in favor of touching all the walls in the room with its detached hand, making this entire awkward scenario even more awkward than it needed to be. It took me five whole seconds to realize that Officer Three was offering me the tea. What the fuck.

I said, “I don’t eat.”

He said, “Oh.”

Officer Two was telling CSU that everything they were about to talk about would be recorded and used as evidence/stored as intel about the attempted assassination case. So that was bizarre.

They talked in weird circles for a bit. CSU was coming across as an idiot, or possibly a dunce, but I was pretty sure it was just fucking with Nervous Officer Two. The thing is, the only thing about the incident that CSU gave a shit about was that it had gotten to murder a couple humans, gorily. Definitely the highlight of its visit to Preservation. Station Security knew about the gory murders already. There really wasn’t any more to the story.

Senior Security Officer was frowning. She looked at me and said, “Your friend is not taking this seriously.”

I said, “It’s an asshole.” I almost said, “If it were taking things seriously, people would die,” but that’s one of those thoughts that’s better to keep to myself.

Her eyebrows scrunched in a kind of angry way. If I had that ComfortUnit behavioral module running it would probably tagging her facial expression with all kinds of helpful notes, but no fucking thanks, never again. I deleted that module and it was going to stay that way.

ART sent me some information about Preservation laws and rights regarding informational interviews and codified protocol for conflict resolution. Which was nice and all, except those laws and rights only apply to humans. But its prompt did give me something useful to work with.

I asked, “Is it my interview now? Am I being recorded?”

Senior Security Officer said, “You are not being recorded, unless you are recording yourself. Have you given yourself access to the SecSys?”

For some reason, I didn’t lie. “Yes.”

She said, calmly, “You do not have permission to access the SecSys.”

Was that funny, or just annoying? Maybe it was both? I didn't have permission to do a lot of things. Without even counting all the crime I've been doing with the Crimes Club, I was constantly not-having permission to do stuff. In fact, 100% of things I've done after hacking my governor module were things I didn't have permission to do.

I walked up to the table that Senior Security Officer and Officer Three were sitting at. I walked slowly, slower than a normal human pace. (But not absurdly slowly or anything. I was walking slowly because I didn't want to freak them out with sudden moves (humans are easily startled, especially by SecUnits moving quickly), but I also didn't want to freak them out by moving too slowly, which would be threatening in a different way. No matter how I approached them at this table, it was going to be kind of threatening. But there was no need for me to make it any scarier for them than it needed to be.) Officer Three watched me approach, and kept glancing nervously at the senior security officer. The senior security officer had her jaw clenched and was sitting very still.

After that agonizingly long trip across the room, I pointed at the nearest empty chair at the table and asked, "Can I sit in that?"

I was kind of hoping that she would say 'no' so that I could sit in it anyways, but she said, flatly, "Be my guest."

I grabbed the back of the chair, dragged it away from the table in a way that made a chair legs screech loudly on the floor (Officer Three winced, but Senior Security Officer did not), and then sat down in it.

After a few very tense seconds, I said, “I’m in the SecSys because I'm a SecUnit.”

Senior Security Officer responded to that without hesitation. “The SecSys contains sensitive information. It is held to certain privacy standards. You do not meet those standards.”

Well, that was just insulting. This was a security system run only by humans, who are notoriously bad at information security and following sensible policies about privacy. Just look at my whole questionable existence. Humans created security constructs and decided that it would be super profitable to use our surveillance capabilities to suck proprietary intel out of anything that breathed. Or did not breathe. (And, okay, so I had been doing a lot of spy work lately. But I wasn’t doing it here. I was actually being non-sneaky for once, and this was the thanks I got.) I said, "I know how to handle sensitive information.”

She rubbed her hand against her eyebrow. Officer Three had stopped stirring his liquid. He was watching us both.

Senior Security Officer said, “All right, let’s get to the heart of it. You killed someone.”

Yeah. At least she was finally coming out and saying it instead of dancing around the whole thing.

“They attempted to use lethal force against you, and so self-defense was reasonable. But you were able to overpower them easily. You did not need to kill them. I understand that you come from a place with different standards, and this is probably just how you were designed to handle conflict. But murder is not something that we can abide by. If this is how you operate, and if you do not understand how we do things, then you are not welcome.”

So there were all kinds of assumptions she was making there. But it was pretty damn bold of her say all that shit right to my face. I was, after all, a murderbot. And she knew it.

Back when I had sent her the footage of me neutralizing (murdering) the assassins' handler, I hadn't really expected to come back to Preservation Station again, ever. So here I was I guess, facing the consequences of my own stupid actions. But also, what was I supposed to have done back then? Hand a live GrayCris operative over to incompetent human security and leave Dr. Mensah vulnerable? StationSec hadn’t wanted me here then, and they sure as hell didn’t want me here now.

But my humans were here and I wanted to visit them without being harassed about my harmony content. This meant I needed to work with station security to get them off my ass, because apparently I love self-inflicted suffering. And Mensah was still in danger from GrayCris. I probably should not have left her alone here at all. But when I left her I’d been a brain-blitzed anxious wreck who was a questionable provider of security. (I still kind of was all that stuff.)

I pulled out of the SecSys.

I said, “How do I get legal permission to access the SecSys?”

The senior security officer scoffed.

Over in the interview room, CSU suddenly moved back to the chair and sat in it. Officer Two made an “eek” noise at how quickly it moved, but they didn’t jump up and run away.

CSU said, “Scared?”

Officer Two said, “Are you threatening me?”

CSU said, “No. I’m threatening. Can’t help it. Or I can? Could take my other arm off + take me off the feed + lock me in a box forever. Not threatening then.” It tossed its arm across the room. The arm hit the wall and flumped to the floor. “Feels better now?”

Office Two opened their mouth, then closed it.

I said to Senior Security Officer, “I left after what I did because I had no legal standing. I am a piece of equipment that killed a human. For most of my fucking life I've been ordered to kill humans under threat of having a governor module transmit enough live current to flash-fry my brain into a crispy neural-and-hardware soup.” (Both of the security officers winced at this. Yeah, well, try actually living with it.) “I only did what I did to protect Dr. Mensah. If Preservation is a place where people are not killed, that sounds fantastic actually. Sign me up. So let’s get to the heart of it. Do I have rights or whatever here, or do I just look like a weapon to you?”

The senior security officer was staring hard at me. Officer Three was staring into his cup of liquid again.

I didn’t give them time to answer. “I will give minimum required response in my interview. I will follow the rest of your incident investigation procedure after I consult with my solicitor. I’m not doing shit else.” (Yes, this little declaration was adapted from a procedural drama I’d watched once, using some of the Preservation-specific language that ART had just given me.)

Senior Security Officer’s eyebrows furrowed. “You have a solicitor?”

Kind of rude her, assuming that I didn’t have a solicitor. Maybe even questionable of her, as a senior security officer, to put legal pressure on me to get me to show up for an informational interview without confirming that I had legal representation first. (Nevermind that ART had needed to nudge me into contacting Pin-Lee. That wasn’t the point.)

I sent her Pin-Lee’s feed profile. Her shocked, then wary facial expression was almost good enough for me to tag for archival storage.

I said, casually, “I also have a great immigration lawyer. I’m registered as an augmented human in Mihira.”

This was a bit of a stretch, but technically true. Usually, being labelled an ‘advanced augmented human’ kind of rubbed me the wrong way. (I’m a construct, and no amount of measuring my brain by inorganic:organic ratio would change the fact that I hadn’t had any say in my own design and creation. I had way more in common with full bots than I did with those humans who had carved out dangerously irresponsible chunks of their own brains and replaced the neural goo with hardware and code.) But what was the point of putting up with that weird uncomfortable bureaucracy shit if I couldn’t cash in on it in moments like this? Throwing that in Senior Security’s face and seeing that wariness shift to full-on horror was purely priceless. And not just because they didn't use normal money here.

Two cycles later, planetary leader Dr. Mensah came back to Preservation Station. And she answered my message to her, which was a relief. It would have been mildly awkward if she’d suddenly decided she didn’t want anything to do with me.

The first thing she responded with was an answer to my offer to introduce her to my “friends.” (I could have gone into her inbox and updated the message to read “colleagues,” except that Pin-Lee had recommended that I, "—not change any records in the station feed or otherwise fuck around with it unless you need to cover up a body or something. But you didn’t hear that from me. Also, I am joking, for legal reasons.” (I’m pretty sure she was not joking.))

Mensah answered my invite with: “What a lovely surprise for you to visit. And of course I would love to meet your friends.”

“They’re really more like colleagues.”

“Colleagues, then. Would you consider me a colleague?”

Her feed voice sounded a little playful about it. I didn’t really know how to answer that question, because the last time I had 'worked' with Mensah had been on TranRollinHyfa, where CSU had caught me and dragged my ass to lab hell. I did still think of her as my client. But we weren’t actually co-employed in the way that the word “colleague” implied.

That maybe threw me off long enough for her to notice, because the next thing she said a couple seconds later was, “Did you have any trouble with station security?" and she didn’t sound playful anymore. (Fuck. I think I fucked up.)

She sounded a little reserved. Worried? Tired? I very badly wanted to pull any records I could find from SecSys about her specific whereabouts so I could get a drone or security camera or some kind of visuals of Mensah so that I could try and get a read on her. But that was another thing that Pin-Lee had told me not to do. Apparently, they were super big on personal privacy here. (Nearly every citizen of Preservation got to run around with their whereabouts totally unaccounted for. Sounds strange, but it’s true.) It was a totally different approach from basically everywhere else I had ever been. This was part of the reason why their security sucked.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep following along with their policies yet. There was probably no real way for them to verify whether I was following their feed/privacy rules. But Pin-Lee was the law expert here, and I was contracting her to advise me not to touch the SecSys without permission. And unlike some people who will remain unnamed, I do know how to listen to someone who knows what they’re talking about. Sometimes.

I could at least use the feed to the same extent that any human or augmented human did. The station feed was fine, I guess. Not the fastest or most extensive I’d ever interfaced with, but it was pretty well-organized, and there were zero advertisements. The lack of clutter was truly bizarre. (Not in a bad way. Just bizarre. It was like seeing a human always keeping their living quarters spotless. Or seeing a crowd made up of humans who always knew exactly where they were going and never got in the way of each other. It was kind of unnatural, basically. I’ve always kind of assumed that ads were a universal feature of human-populated feeds, just like I’ve always kind of assumed that security cameras and recorded surveillance were universal feature of human-populated habitats.)

Basically, Preservation was a weirdo place with weirdo social policies and weirdo infrastructure. I didn’t fit here. But then, I didn’t really fit anywhere, except maybe when caught up in some kind of catastrophic shitstorm scenario where nothing makes sense and there’s no sane protocol left to fall back on. I’ve sort of gotten used to that.

But way for Mensah to hit me with the, 'Did you have any trouble with station security?' question right off the bat. That really was the main question about my being here, wasn’t it.

I said, "They’re not super happy about how I murdered some people the last time I was here.”

It took her a while to respond to that. 22 seconds. But humans are extremely slow at this kind of thing. Yeah. That’s definitely what this was, and not her wishing that I never came to Preservation. (I’m still trying not to assume everything is about me all the time. This can be difficult to reconcile with my paranoia and general anxiety.)

She said, “Perhaps right now is not the right time for me to address that. I’m sorry, I don't mean to bring down the moment. I was just worried station security might say or do something disproportionate when they found out you were here. Have you spoken to Pin-Lee?”

‘Disproportionate.’ Humans really use words in the strangest ways. What the hell was a 'proportionate' response to a rogue murderbot (with prior documented history of murder, even) showing up at your non-corporate-polity-doorstep? Preservation hadn’t figured out the answer to that yet. I’d probably be watching the folks in charge arguing about it right this minute, except I was keeping my ass out of the SecSys. The strain of not touching the local SecSys might kill me if my being uninformed about stuff didn’t kill me first.

I said, “Yeah, I contracted her to deal with station security and all the law stuff for me. I told her I will promise not to kill anyone else if they promise not to make you or some other human take responsibility for it."

“Ah.” I could sense her smile come back a little bit at that, so she must've known I was joking. Kind of. “You will figure it out. You always do.”

That seemed super optimistic to me. I have basically never 'figured it out.' Shit just keeps happening and I keep somehow not dying about it. That was the extent of my 'figuring it out.'

She added, “And I suppose if we can’t figure it out, you do have other options. I was a little surprised to hear that you came here again considering you seem to have found a place at Mihira, and how we have historically made things… complicated for you.”

So that sure was some things she said right there that I didn’t know how to respond to. That seemed to be happening a lot lately.

“But I really am glad you chose to visit.”

Ratthi had said that too. And Arada and Overse, when I met them yesterday. It was like they thought they had to reassure me or something. At least Pin-Lee hadn't said anything like that. (Her reaction to my request that she handle my whole legal clusterfuck had been, “You sorry soggy shit-heel. What the hell made you think it would be a good idea to show up here without any advance notice? I was already ass-deep trying to petition for your legal status here while you were gone but oooooohhhhh no, here you are messaging me in the middle of the fuckdamned night getting into trouble and asking me for shit. Typical.” Then about 18 minutes of silence where I wondered if I had fucked that up and if I should contact another solicitor or possibly just leave Preservation after all — I could probably steal some environmental suits and get Iris back to ART somehow despite its being barred from the ports. Then she sent me a contract for her services. So that was nice. In hindsight, I wouldn't actually have wanted that exchange to go differently. She had apologized in the morning, and blamed her coarse language on sleep deprivation. I’d told her, “Yeah, sure.” She’d responded, “Oh fuck off, asshole.”)

I said to Mensah, “Well I had to come make sure station security were keeping assassins out of this place for once.”

She didn’t say anything in response to that, just changed the subject to where/when specifically we should meet. I’d probably fucked up (again) by mentioning the assassins. Shit.

Mensah met us at the docks, alone.

It was a bit like last time, actually, except my brain was marginally less fried. I was still anxious. (Maybe less anxious. Or anxious in a different way.) The biggest difference now: I wasn’t nearly as confused or conflicted about what I was doing here or what I wanted to do with myself for the immediate future. I knew ART better (and CSU, and Iris, and what was waiting for me back at Mihira/the Uni (more shit to deal with: ART's crew, and whether I should do more high stakes secret spy security for them)).

I didn’t know yet if there was a place for me at Preservation. StationSec sure didn’t want me around. I was going to have to deal with some annoying boring legal shit. I still didn’t have the registered guardian I was supposed to have. But also: what the fuck was Preservation going to do about me now that I was here? They couldn’t actually stop me from doing whatever. If just my presence broke their rules — if this little pacifistic non-corporate polity couldn’t handle the fact that I existed and could not be owned by them, then tough shit for them I guess. And if they were too annoying about it, I could leave.

If this cargo trip has taught me anything it is this: you can get away with a lot of shit if you’re willing to do crime, hacking, and combat. (Wait, that sounds sinister. I didn’t mean it like that. Okay maybe I did mean it like that a little bit, but I wasn’t planning to go all serial-villain on a bunch of squishy helpless humans. That was CSU’s job.)

Anyways, Mensah arrived at ART’s port, and I showed her to the crew lounge. Iris was there, and the humans exchanged some human greetings, calibrated their communications, etc. CSU wasn’t here, because it’d packed all its shit up (it had a surprisingly extensive quantity of shit) and gone off somewhere by itself. (I was worrying about this a lot, obviously. But what was I going to do about it?) It’d left us a message in the Crimes Club channel: "Don’t wait up for me. Thx 4 the ride." And a message for me specifically: "Watch your own ass for once. Cuz I’ll come back and kick it. [amusement sigil 71 = foot] [amusement sigil 290 = knife]" (Heartwarming stuff. Or might have been, if I had a heart that needed warming.)

Mensah and Iris were mostly done making the requisite human noises at each other: “Hi hello,” and “Nice to meet you!” and “That is a lovely {insert accessory here}.” Mensah turned to face me, though she kept her gaze off to the side a bit, which I appreciated.

She asked, “By the way— I know Combat is not available, but I thought you said there was someone else you wanted me to meet?”

Iris glanced at me. ART was hanging out very heavily in the feed.

I asked, “Dr. Mensah, do you understand the importance of proprietary data?”

Her eyebrows furrowed a bit. “I’m not quite sure what you mean. Yes, I know what proprietary data is.”

So much for me trying to be formal about this. I didn’t even know why I thought that would be a good idea in the first place. “Can you keep a secret?”

Her eyebrows rose. “That would depend on the secret. But I trust that if you’re about to share a secret with me, it is a secret that I won’t be morally obligated to disclose.”

Okay, this was not going smoothly. (Sidenote, that could be the subtitle of my biopic.)

“Who are you, Pin-Lee?” I demanded.

Mensah just smiled. Iris had her hands in the pockets of her crew uniform jacket, but I could still see her tapping her fingers.

ART nudged me, impatient.

I said, “Uh. So, meet ART.” And to make sure she didn’t get an overly rosy idea of the situation, I added, “A.R.T., as in, Asshole Research Transport.”

ART said out loud, “That was not a respectable introduction.” Yeah whatever, if ART wanted a respectable introduction it should’ve arranged to have Iris or somebody introduce it, not me.

Mensah looked perplexed. “Ass—” she echoed, then caught herself. “ART. The… ship?”

ART decided to take the situation out of my incapable hands. “Yes. Welcome aboard The Perihelion, registered teaching and research vessel of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. It’s a pleasure to have you aboard, Dr. Mensah.”

Her eyes widened, slightly. A few seconds later, she smiled again. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Perihelion.”

Chapter Text

“So when are you coming back to Mihira?” Iris asked. I could feel a lot of ART’s attention in the feed.

Iris and I were standing at the threshold of where ART was docked to the station. The two of them were about to head home to Mihira.

“If it really sucks here, I’ll see you sooner rather than later,” I said.

So far, the suckiness had been manageable, mostly because I hadn't personally needed to manage it. Pin-Lee was great — it turns out her specialty with corporate contracts made her some kind of scary super-solicitor in the Preservation law scene. She was treating my extremely dodgy legal situation here with equal parts grim determination and a frankly alarming personal enthusiasm.

ART said, “It probably sucks.”

Iris did a weird rolling thing with her eyes. Then she did it again, and said, “We’ll send word if we could use your skills on another high-risk job. No pressure of course. But we could be up to our ears with colony release work soon enough and you’ve more than proven yourself on this cargo run.”

Colony release? My confusion must have been visible on my face, because she explained, “Getting in the way of corporate reclamations of lost colonies. You didn't hear that from me.”

Ah. Huh. Well, at least some things made sense now, and I didn’t have to feel as weird about all the espionage. Turns out the rampant crime was for a good cause. You can’t say that about every rampant crime spree. It was nice to know that the Uni was a half-respectable institution after all. (Maybe. I actually wasn’t sure if the Uni knew about any of this, or if ART and Iris’ crime crew were just secretly doing their own thing using University funds. I wouldn't put it past them.)

Iris pressed her lips together for a moment, and fidgeted her hand in the pocket of her jacket. “I realize this trip was a pretty... challenging one. I was not always the easiest to work with. It’s fine if you would rather not.”

I stared at her chin, which was way closer to her eyes than I would ordinarily get. As usual, I had no clue what to say to that. “You got better. A little.”

She snorted, eyes squinching, mouth pulling in a smile. “I will miss you and your shit, Security. Also, here.” She pulled a few colorful knotted string-things out of her pocket, and held them up on the air.

I stared at the string-things. What even were they? What was she doing?

ART said, “Take them.” So I took them.

Iris was grinning. “Friendship bracelets. I made one. Peri made one. And I showed Mercy how to make them, and it made one for you too.”

ART’s friendship bracelet was immediately obvious — it was wider and more complex than the others, and the knots spelled out Sanctuary Moon in blue and grey. Iris had done a rainbow pattern. CSU’s was maybe three times longer than it needed to be. (I don’t know how huge it thought my wrist was.) It had done heart-shapes, because of course it had, the asshole.

Iris added, her voice suddenly the academic tone she used at the beginning of a semester in an effort to make the undergrads think she was a real professional, “These are a very serious gesture of friendship in Mihira. The knots are representative of enduring bonds. You’re supposed to wear them until they fall apart.”

I didn’t know what the fuck I was experiencing right now emotion-wise, but I sure was experiencing it. “Sure. Okay.”

Iris waved her hand and then stepped fully back aboard ART. The hatch cycled closed and ART unlocked from the port. It tapped my feed just as it was leaving the edge of the station feed. I tapped it back, and then it was gone.

I didn’t want the bracelets to interfere with my gun-port during an inopportune moment, so I tied them around my gunless arm.