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Amena’s first reaction when she heard that Second Mom’s survey ended early was excitement, because it meant that Second Mom would be coming home.
Second Mom coming home from a survey was an unshakable excuse for an extra-special family dinner party. Uncle Thiago would bake the little cakes that were Amena’s favorite. They would put up the string-lights inside of the house and the kids would make a big decorated sign that read “WELCOME HOME!!!!!” The sign was a tradition that Amena had started, and it was her honor and duty to draw in the fancy lettered script.
These past few years, Second Mom had spent a lot of time up on the station doing planetary leader stuff, and the family hadn’t seen much of her on the farm. Amena felt Second Mom’s absence as a constant ache shelved in the back of her mind. But the station wasn’t truly distant, neither physically nor in the feed.
The survey was different. Second Mom had been gone for over a month, unreachable but for exchanges of messages sent and received with a lag of several days.
So, Amena was excited to find out that the survey was ending early.
When she found out the news of why the survey had been cut short, the excitement went cold.
Second Mom was so very, very far away.
It wasn’t just physically — she was in a different world, a corporate jurisdiction. She was in a realm full of alien dangers, alien laws. It was a world that didn’t sound real, like it should only exist in creepy entertainment media.
The adults tried to keep the worst of it under wraps. When asked, they said weird vague things like, “Oh, Second Mom is caught up in a lot of corporate legal nonsense, it will be sorted out soon and then she’ll come home.” Or “Don’t worry about it Amena, she’s out of danger now, thank goodness.” But they never wanted to talk about it, or answer any real questions.
Amena was practically an adult. She could handle the truth. She tried to state her case to her parents, aunts, uncles, and entles, but they refused to take her seriously.
So she looked up the news herself. She put together a stack of articles about GrayCris and DeltFall and the bond company. She squinted through lawsuit documentation and puzzled through corporate jargon. She read about SecurityUnits and alien remnants. It was like peering through a pinhole into a distorted world of corruption and chaos.
One day (the day that Second Mom should have finished her survey and come home), she asked Uncle Thiago and First Mom, “What’s a SecUnit, really?”
Uncle Thiago and First Mom had been sitting on the front porch, speaking in hushed, urgent tones. They had abruptly begun talking loudly about the goats when Amena had appeared from inside the house, the screen-door creaking as she pushed it open, creaking again when she let it slam shut.
At Amena’s question, they fell silent about the goats, and looked at each other, expressions grim, eyebrows twitching, heads shaking ever-so-slightly in that silent grown-up way.
Amena pressed, “Why did Second Mom buy one and then let it leave? Didn’t she get it because she needs security?”
First Mom looked at Amena, her eyebrows tilted worriedly, her teeth digging into her lip. First Mom glanced at Uncle Thiago, and then patted the seat next to her on the porch bench.
Amena sat down.
First Mom said, softly, “Your Second Mom has been kidnapped.”
Amena stared. Her stomach was suddenly a big heavy stone.
It was pre-dawn, and Amena was up doing chores. The ground-frost crunched under her boots. Her breath clouded as vapor in the air. It was a dry winter coldness and it would melt away with the sun.
They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. (It’s not. But it is, in fact, coldest.)
Amena was feeding the goats and listening to music through her clip-on feed interface when a message came through and landed in the farm’s slow-ass feed. She opened it. It was a message from Second Mom, explaining that she’d been rescued and that she was en route back to Preservation.
Amena froze, hands tight on the lid of the feed bin. She stood there for one short eternity, before she dashed from the barn back to the main house, boots crunching ice as she went.
The door banged open as she went in, and she yelled, running through the house, heedless of the early hour, heedless of the melting dirty footprints she was tracking behind her, “Second Mom is coming home!”
But when Second Mom arrived in the system, she didn’t come home. She sent a note explaining that she would be staying on the station for a while. She wrote that that she would love to see anyone who could make the trip up.
It would take Amena’s other parents several days to make the arrangements in their schedules. But Amena could not wait another minute to see Second Mom, and she was old enough to make the trip up by herself. She could skip a day of school for this. Her teachers would understand.
First Mom had sighed when Amena had shared her preposed solo itinerary in the farm feed over breakfast.
“Go and come home safe,” First Mom said, and the perfunctory words felt heavier than they ever had before. Amena’s younger siblings had whined and cajoled that Amena should take them along too. Hani in particular had put up quite the fuss, and pouted when Amena told them, “Maybe next time, when it’s not so last-minute.” (Saying that made Amena feel old, somehow.)
She took the shuttle up to Preservation, alone. She’d only done this a handful of times before. It had never been such an important journey.
She met Second Mom at the ports. Second Mom looked… different, from how Amena remembered her, though Amena couldn’t say why. Her eyes were so tired. Her smile was a twist. Her embrace was the same, but tighter.
“Let me look at you, honey,” Second Mom said, when they finally pulled apart. Her hand futzed with the collar of Amena’s jacket. Her gaze trailed over Amena’s face. “Have you been holding up okay?”
“I’m fine,” Amena said, believing it, “Are you okay?”
“I’ve never been happier to be back,” Second Mom replied, warm, “I’ve missed you so much.”
Amena hugged her again, and only cried a little.
Second Mom was staying at the station because of SecUnit, who had been injured while rescuing Second Mom from GrayCris. (Or something.) Amena saw it only once, when she’d gone with Second Mom to fetch an extra cardigan from the station hotel. When Amena stepped into the room, SecUnit had slipped away, moving so fast it was just a blur, slamming the door behind itself as it went.
“Um,” Amena said, glancing away from the firmly closed door to wave awkwardly at a survey person who was lounging in the common space. “Hello, I’m Amena.”
“Hi Amena!” the survey person — Dr. Ratthi, his feed-tag said — smiled brightly and waved back at her. Second Mom crossed the room to pick up a soft red cardigan draped over the back of one of the seats.
“Who was—?” Amena asked, gesturing at the closed door.
“Oh, that’s SecUnit,” Dr. Ratthi said. A moment later, maybe reading Amena’s expression, he added, “Don’t worry. It’s not you. SecUnit is just shy, and it’s still in the middle of a system rebuild.”
“Oh, okay,” Amena said, as if she knew what that meant. The cheerfulness in her voice felt automatic, like it was not really her own. “It’s nice to meet you!”
“Same to you!” Dr. Ratthi said, and then Second Mom was back at the door, touching Amena’s shoulder gently, and they went out to get lunch.
Second Mom did come back to the farm, a couple weeks after that. They had the usual Welcome-Back-From-A-Survey party, but there was something different about it. The string-lights were as bright as ever, and the kids had outdone themselves on the “WELCOME HOME!!!!!” poster.
But, still.
Second Mom didn’t stay home for very long. She still had her planetary leader stuff to do on the station, and legal stuff left over from the whole incident with GrayCris. Amena heard her parents talking in hushed tones again, but could never quite get close enough to properly eavesdrop.
So Second Mom went back to the station, and time passed, and Amena went to visit her sometimes, and everything started to feel pretty normal again. Amena could almost forget that her mother had been kidnapped and threatened with death by corporates.
(Almost.)
When festival came around, Second Mom came back to the farm. She brought SecUnit along.
Amena had overheard Uncle Thiago complain about the SecUnit to the other adults more than once. He complained about how anxious Second Mom seemed lately, how reliant she was on the SecUnit for security she didn’t really need. And Parent might say something offhand about how SecUnit was a corporate surveillance machine. And then First Mom would remind everyone that SecUnit had saved Second Mom’s life. And then Uncle Thiago would emphasize, again, that that didn’t mean the SecUnit didn’t have flaws.
When SecUnit came to the farm with Second Mom, it didn’t speak or mingle with the family. It spent a lot of time wordlessly hanging around Second Mom, a sort of humanoid shadow creeping along the peripheries. It did not make eye contact or show up to dinner or socialize with anyone. Its drones pervaded the place, a fleet of little camera-things watching everything that happened around the house, trailing after Second Mom or hovering by doors and windows.
It was creepy. Amena found herself checking over her shoulder and in the corners of rooms. At least she never found any drones inside her room. (Not that she noticed, anyway. But still. Creepy.) Every time she saw one of those drones, it reminded her of what Parent had said, about SecUnit being a corporate surveillance machine. And it reminded her of what Uncle Thiago had said, about SecUnit being overprotective and feeding Second Mom’s anxiety.
But she didn’t realize just how creepy and over-involved the SecUnit was, until it barged directly into her personal life.
Amena had met a guy at the festival. His name was Madan. He was fun, and cute, and he liked all the same music that she did. She spent a better part of a couple days enjoying the festival with him, and as they watched a musical performance together, he’d held her hand and she’d thought this is what they always talked about. The excitement, the delight, the butterflies. This was what it meant to be young and living life.
Madan invited her to go hang out with some friends at his camp house. As they walked to the meeting place, she joked, he laughed, and they talked about nothing in particular. The summer night was warm, the breeze light, the stars brilliant in the cloudless sky. The half-light of the walkway lamps lit Madan’s face from below like a painting. It was a perfect snapshot of a perfect moment, dreamlike, where you could forget about all the bad things.
And it shattered back into a weird and awkward reality, when he turned the lights on in the camp house and a shape was unveiled from the darkness, a person standing there like a weird stiff corpse with flat, unblinking eyes, a drone swerving slowly overhead in an arc, the camera-lens glittering.
Amena jumped, clapped a hand over her mouth. Madan screamed, an ear-scraping noise.
The SecUnit stood there, dead-frozen and staring, a fucking movie-monster that had materialized out of the dark.
“What the hell?” Amena demanded, her heart fluttering from the feeling of being dunked in the ice-water of reality after having dared to pretend her life could be a little fun for once, a little daring and delightful. “What are you doing here?”
Madan stuttered, “What— Who—?”
(Was the SecUnit just following her around, creeping along in the shadows? What the fuck was this? Was it doing this to everyone in her family, or just her? Why her?)
She ground out, “That’s my second mother’s… friend. And her. Security… person.”
“What?” Madan’s face was contorted in confusion. And then he tensed up, and stepped away, and it felt like a huge gulf of distance had opened up between them. He said, “Uh… I guess… You’d better go.”
Amena felt heat in her cheeks. It was not possible to tell if it was embarrassment, or rage, or some ugly combination of both. She turned and marched out the door and back down the path they’d come down. The night didn’t feel dreamy and sweet anymore. The little pathway guide-lights were no longer pretty and romantic. She wanted to kick them.
The SecUnit caught up to her, trailing her footsteps like a shadow until it pulled up alongside. She almost wished it would go back to creeping, so that she could try to pretend it wasn’t there.
She demanded, “How did you know where I was? What were you doing, hiding under the porch?” Did it have cameras following her every move, all the time? Is this was what it was like to live in the Corporation Rim?
And then, unexpectedly, the SecUnit spoke. Its voice was little higher than she might have expected from a person as big as it was, and scathingly sarcastic.
“Wow, that was rude. Especially considering that I’m your second mother’s—” (here it actually made little quote-marks with its fingers), “‘friend.’ Is that how you talk to your bot-servants?”
The shock of hearing the SecUnit talk, and to hear it talk like that blanked Amena’s mind for a moment. She’d half-thought it couldn’t talk. That it wasn’t designed to, or something. And the whole thing about bot-servants…
“No,” she said. She was still far too angry and embarrassed to think straight. And guilty now, on top of everything, at the realization that she’d assumed things about this SecUnit and its capabilities and personality— it had a personality, for one thing, and she’d known it was a person but it had never acted like a person and now she was thinking about the one class from school about machine intelligences and the sapience paradox and bot rights. Who was this SecUnit? And— nevermind! It didn’t matter. This didn’t matter. It had been following her, and she was right to be angry, so none of that other stuff mattered, anyway. “I don’t have bot-servants! I didn’t know— I never heard you talk.”
It said, flatly, “You didn’t ask.” And then it added, “No one else approached that house. He lied about meeting other humans there.”
So it had been following her, watching her, maybe for the whole entire time it had been down on the planet. It had certainly been watching her hang out with Madan all evening. Her Second Mom’s… friend… had been watching her hang out with Madan and have fun at the festival— recording her, even! Amena had been saying things, doing things, having fun, and the SecUnit had been watching all of that… And what was it saying to her, now? That Madan had been luring her under false pretenses? It was as if her chest had been punctured, as if nothing was real, as if her whole life was a game or a media entertainment that she’d been playing a role in without knowing it was all fake. She didn’t need this SecUnit barging into her life, meddling with her shit like she was a child who didn’t know anything about anything.
Why had Second Mom brought it home?
Amena would be going on her very first survey in just a couple weeks. She’d been preparing in every way she could — reading through the study objectives, taking the self-defense certification, drafting her own project plans, checking and double-checking her gear list. This would be her first time leaving the Preservation system main, and her first time acting as a real scientist on a real survey. It was going to go perfectly.
And then, during one of their usual catching-up calls, Second Mom told her that SecUnit would be going on the survey, too.
As soon as her call with Second Mom ended, Amena called up Parent and First Mom about it.
“Tell Second Mom she doesn’t need to send the SecUnit to watch me on my survey!” she burst out, as soon as the connection landed.
“Wait, huh? Can you say that again? What’s wrong?” Parent asked. Judging by the graininess of their feed connection, they were out in one of the outflung areas of the farm where the feed coverage was extra shaky.
First Mom sighed, and said, “Amena, Second Mom just wants you to be safe.”
“Uncle Thiago is coming already, it’s not like there won’t be anyone supervising me,” Amena complained, “It’s not even like I’m going somewhere super dangerous! And there will be other survey members! It’s like she doesn’t trust me! And that SecUnit will just be following me around with all its drones, judging everything I do— Parent, tell her she’s being unreasonable, tell her I don’t need corporate-style round-the-hour surveillance—”
“Uh,” said Parent “Okay, Amena honey—” and then their voice went all static and garbled for a few seconds. “—asked her about this?”
“I think it would be best if you talked about this with Second Mom,” First Mom said, firmly, and then rung up Second Mom’s feed connection before Amena could protest.
Amena made a loud annoyed noise in the back of her throat as Second Mom’s feed connection landed.
“Amena has something she’d like to discuss,” First Mom said, in that even, patient way she had that could be so infuriating when you weren’t feeling even and patient.
“Is something the matter?” Second Mom asked.
Amena was silent. She tugged on a coil of hair and scowled at the far wall of the school chemistry lab, at the poster of lab safety tips. Her eyes darted away from the poster to the immaculate lab bench next to her, then scanned across the empty lab at everything put away all neat and organized. (It had been her turn to wrap up lab and she always did a thorough job of it.)
“Amena?” Second Mom asked, in that gentle way that made Amena feel like a kid again. But Second Mom had been away so much of the time, lately. Why should Second Mom be the one to dictate how Amena went about her life now? It wasn’t like Second Mom could be bothered to come watch over Amena directly. No, she had to send her super-machine to do it for her.
“You don’t trust me,” Amena blurted out, “You’re sending the SecUnit to watch me on my survey like I’m some baby who needs looking after.”
A moment of silence, on the call.
And then Second Mom said, “I asked SecUnit to provide security for the survey because I trust it will do everything in its ability to keep everyone on the survey safe. It is very good at what it does. No human security team can do better.”
“A human security team doesn’t have a million drones to watch everybody through constantly,” Amena said, hotly.
“Yes,” Second Mom said, apparently taking the wrong meaning. Maybe Second Mom’s time in the Corporation Rim had skewed her idea of what was normal.
The rest of the conversation didn’t go much better, and Second Mom refused to retract the SecUnit as survey security.
So, that was a survey that would be ruined.
As it turned out, Amena had almost no interaction with the SecUnit over the course of the survey. It lurked out of sight most of the time, though Amena saw it talking to Dr. Arada or Dr. Ratthi once or twice, and its drones hovered around the facility as a constant reminder of its watchful eye. But it didn’t try to talk to Amena. It only sent her one message on the feed over the course of the entire survey, when she’d been about to take a dive down to the marine sample rig: it had sent Amena an alert that a latch on her environmental suit hadn’t locked properly. She hadn’t even realized that it was an alert from the SecUnit and not the suit itself until after she’d re-locked the latch and gone into the water.
And then whole the hostage thing happened. Amena watched through the cameras as a boat full of local raiders took her uncle hostage. She had both hands sealing shut her mouth, both eyes blown wide and unblinking. She hadn’t seen the SecUnit get shot and fall off the facility, but the facility feed was full of chatter about it. She couldn’t believe that this was happening, in real life, with real guns, with her real Uncle Thiago. It didn’t feel like an entertainment at all, even though the view through the camera looked like an action movie. The reality of it felt too close, the terror too personal, and there was nothing really coherent going on in Amena’s mind except the crystal-clear thought that “Oh, he could die. He could really die,” and the muddy, messy familiarity of it all, how this felt just like being told that Second Mom had been kidnapped and knowing in a deep and wordless way that Second Mom might never come home again.
And then the SecUnit came out of the raiders’ boat, soaking wet and stomping in that weird not-quite-human-precision-gait, its every motion just dripping with fury.
And despite everything, the relief that hit Amena at the sight of this was like a wave that lifted her instead of drowning her.
They had a few days of downtime in the facility as they travelled back home in the wormhole. Uncle Thiago came and talked to Amena, assuring her that they were safe now, checking that she was okay. He’d always been easy to talk to. He could be kind of stuffy and overbearing sometimes, in the way that adults and caretakers tended to be. But he also got Amena in the way that her parents didn’t quite. It was easier to joke with him about things that would have been awkward to joke about with Second Mom.
The SecUnit, obviously, did not come and talk to Amena. It did not talk to anyone, as far as she knew, except to be rude to Uncle Thiago.
They arrived back in Preservation main system, and everything went to shit again.
Everything went from normal to terrible in pretty short order. Amena didn’t know what was going on, just that alarms were going off, the feed was glitching, the whole room was in motion— things flying off the shelves and sliding off the countertops— a lab bench slamming into her gut— Kanti screaming out in confusion— the lights went out, leaving only emergency glows on the walls— pain, distant at first, and then way too close— and when things stopped moving and Amena could sort out what had happened, she found herself pinned under a lab bench, her leg screaming at her, her lungs breathless.
“Amena! Amena!” Kanti yelled out from the darkness, from somewhere Amena couldn’t see because she was pinned under a lab bench and oh yeah it was dark as shit.
“I’m here!” Amena yelled, and tried to call for help in the feed, but nobody responded. She tried not to panic. It wouldn’t help to panic.
Kanti scrambled into view, a shadowy, clumsy shape, “Oh stars and ancestors,” she gulped, voice high and thin and too-loud-too-close, “Is that you? Amena!”
“Yeah! It’s me! Get me out of here!” Tears were leaking out of Amena’s eyes. Her leg hurt, but that wasn’t nearly as upsetting as being pinned, in the dark, not knowing what the fuck was going on and not able to get out and move.
Kanti tried to help Amena lift the lab bench up, then pry at it with a tool, but it was too heavy. Kanti’s breathing was loud, and she kept moving weirdly, swerving and staggering.
Amena wiped some snot onto her shoulder, and tried to steady her voice. “Kanti, are you okay?”
“I hit my— I think I hit my head— ugh,” Kanti hissed, and lost her footing as she tried to tug on Amena’s arms, falling down on her butt on the floor, “I can’t—”
“Go get help,” Amena said, “The feed’s down.”
“Right, right,” Kanti whispered, and stumbled back to her feet, scrambled to the door. There were shuffling noises from across the room, then a bang. Kanti screamed a curse, and cried, “It won’t open!”
What followed was several tense minutes of Kanti trying to figure out how to get the door open, cursing and hissing and attacking the hatch with a tool. And Amena kept trying to pry the lab bench off herself, tried to calm herself, tell herself that someone would come and help them, surely, tried to ignore the possibility that the rest of the facility was in even worse shape, that maybe everyone else was already— no, it was going to be okay.
But it felt like forever, in that half-lit-emergency-glow darkness, and just as Amena thought she was about to lose her mind and start screaming her throat out, the door to the lab slid open, light spilling through, and the SecUnit stood there, catching Kanti as she staggered forward.
It pulled her into the light of the hallway. It said, harsh, “Get to the gravity well, now.”
Kanti stared up at it dazedly, and from this angle Amena could just see the red glitter of blood oozing down her forehead.
“Kanti, go!” Amena yelled, and Kanti went, and the SecUnit ducked into the lab compartment.
“Here, here!” Amena slammed a palm on the lab bench, “We couldn’t pry it up!”
It moved, quickly but not erratically, its motions perfectly precise and steady. It pried at the bench, then tugged Amena out from under it, picked her up like she weighed nothing, and flew out the lab module and down the hall.
And just as Amena thought that they were going to make it back to the group and everything was going to be okay—
Everything got worse.
The facility had been attacked, Amena’s leg was giving her hell, and now she was being kidnapped into the airlock of a weird ship. Amena and the SecUnit came out of the airlock and then just stood in the hallway as the lock cycled closed behind them.
And the SecUnit, being the SecUnit, was silent. Not a word of reassurance, not a word of explanation or speculation. Amena tried to calm herself down, forcing herself into breathing exercises, but she had precious little to work with.
She couldn’t stand it. “Where are the crew? Why did they do this? What do they want with us?”
The SecUnit didn’t answer, just stood there, rigid, frozen.
Amena knew that the SecUnit was probably the one person who could actually materially help her survive this batshit kidnapping situation, but she still wished (illogically) that it had been someone else who had been kidnapped with her. Anyone else. Someone who would talk to her, tell her that it was going to be okay, even if it was a lie.
“Please talk to me.”
The SecUnit still stood silent. Its face was not really visible through the visor of the EVAC suit. The breathing exercises weren’t enough, and Amena was just fighting to not hyperventilate.
Finally, the SecUnit said, its voice sounding a little strange through the comm, “I think I recognize this ship, but it’s not supposed to be here.”
“What— What ship is it?”
The SecUnit said, still in that weird comm-voice, “What do the patches on those EVAC suits say?”
Amena looked at the EVAC suits arranged neatly in their closet by the airlock. (Oh, great. The SecUnit was choosing now to be a smartass again and point out her lack of observational skills.)
“Perihelion. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”
None of this made sense. A university ship? It must have been hijacked by the raiders, but—
“Wait, you know this ship.” (What was going on here, really?) “Did you do something to them? Are they here after you?”
It responded, quickly, “Of course not.”
(And what could Amena do, anyway? Whether or not it was lying?)
The SecUnit released the helmet of its EVAC suit, releasing a bunch of drones, before unfastening the suit and stepping out. Its face was contorted in a weird way Amena didn’t really understand, its brows drawn together, mouth twisted.
They walked through the empty halls of the ship. Amena didn’t know where they were going. Maybe the SecUnit was planning to find the raiders and have some kind of showdown with them? Hijack the ship back? Unless this was something completely else. Unless the SecUnit was in on it. Unless—
The SecUnit rounded a corner ahead of her, and something slammed into the side of its head, and it crumpled to the floor, bits of shattered machine parts falling around it as it collapsed, eyes blank and open, mouth slack.
Amena hadn’t even had the time to process this, before a voice spoke, chilling, reverbing oddly from the effects of translation tech, “Why hello, little child.”
The grey people took her to a room where there were two other hostages, roughed-up and scared. They began to interrogate her, all sing-song-sweet and uncanny, sharp teeth flashing, thin grey lips smirking. They kept demanding things and laughing at her, calling her pet-names, calling her stupid, and even leaving aside the fact that they were grey, nothing about them made sense. The translation software worked fine but it was like they were from a whole different universe; they were never satisfied with her answers, their logic was twisted and incomprehensible, as if the rules of their world were something completely foreign, and some part of Amena kept thinking alien, alien, alien. After all, why not? Reality was warping around her.
The grey people kept scoffing at her, dismissive and demanding. Amena wanted to hide and cry, but didn’t. There was nowhere to hide. As the interrogation dragged on she started to think that this was hopeless. There was nothing she could do to make it out of here. She was trapped in this mirror-world where nothing made sense.
And then the SecUnit stepped into the room. It had cuts and flecks of dried blood on the side of its face. And it looked mad, the way it had when it had stepped off the raider’s boat back on the survey planet, all those million million lifetimes ago. And the relief Amena felt was the exact same. Maybe nothing made sense in this chaos-alien world that she’d been thrown into, but the SecUnit was here. It could handle this. This was what it was good at, right? Impossible action-rescue stuff?
The grey people turned and looked at it. One of them said to the other, accusing, “You said this one was dead.”
The other responded, “Poor thing was dead.” And laughed.
A muscle jumped in the SecUnit’s jaw. Its nostrils flared.
Amena expected it to start shooting its arm-guns or something, but instead it just said, “What did you do to art?”
(Nonsensical.)
(None of it felt real.)
(But it was real. What was going on?)
One of the grey people tilted their head and said, “You’re babbling, poor thing.”
The SecUnit’s expression was hard. Its body was perfect-still, but its face was pinched with fury. It said, voice tight and low, “This transport. What did you do to the bot pilot?”
One of the grey people lilted, “We deleted it, of course.”
All at once, the SecUnit’s face changed, eyes widening under drawn brows, teeth baring to the gums as its expression contorted from ‘angry’ to ‘pure fucking murder.’
“Oh shit,” Amena whispered, and her neurons connected to the SecUnit saying “I think I recognize this ship—” It knew this ship. Maybe it knew the crew. And Amena was in the middle of wracking her brain for what she’d learned in that class about machine intelligences and the sapience paradox and bot rights, but she couldn’t really remember—
“Oh, this one looks angry,” one of the grey people said, as if it were funny.
The other said, “How boring. Angry, then afraid, then dead. Boring boring boring.”
The first one said, “You belong to us now, all of you. This is what’s going to happen. You will tell us—”
The SecUnit grabbed them by the face and threw them into the wall. It had moved so fast that Amena hadn’t seen it cross the room.
The SecUnit spoke (and maybe it was just her, or maybe its voice really did sound a little hysterical), “Angry, then afraid, then dead. Is that the right order?”
Several seconds of extremely fast movement later, the SecUnit stopped slamming the limp bloody body of one of the grey people against the ceiling, and dropped it to the floor. The SecUnit's hand was soaked with blood, and it had blood sprayed cross its face and chest, and its eyes were wide and staring at nothing. It turned slowly on its heels towards the other gray person, who was making a break for it out the door, but the gray people’s big round drones had woken back up and were starting to move.
“SecUnit, the drones!” Amena yelled, but it didn’t seem to hear her, so she yelled again, louder, “SECUNIT, LOOK!”
It twitched, then stomped one of the drones with its boot and grabbed the second one as it took off into the air, smashing it through a floating display surface, as the other two hostages began talking all at once, grabbing at Amena’s arm, “You have to come with us!” “Quick, before they send more drones!”
Amena turned to the SecUnit, who was just standing there, staring flatly at nothing. She said, “We should go with them.”
“I have something I need to finish off,” it said. Amena noticed it was trembling, its face twitching erratically, expressions flitting across its face too fast to really parse. Amena still didn’t exactly know what it was thinking, still didn’t know what exactly was going on, but she knew that something terrible had happened— was happening, and if they were going to get out of this alive they needed to stick together.
One of the hostages hissed, “There are too many drones, you have to come with us!”
Amena stepped towards the SecUnit. She needed it to stay with her, physically and mentally. “Are they right? Can you tell if the drones are coming for us?”
“Probably,” it said, still not looking directly at her. Still just staring wide-eyed and twitchy at some unknown distance.
“Then let’s go!” Amena urged, but the SecUnit just kept standing there.
Amena limped another step forward and grabbed its arm. The sleeve was wet with spots of blood. She needed it to snap out of this weird freaky machine-trance it seemed to be stuck in. “Listen to me!”
It finally turned its head and looked down at her, actually looked at her, with its eyes, for the first time. (Maybe the first time ever.)
She tried to make her voice sound firm and authoritative, the way Second Mom did. “We have to go with them. Now.”
It slowly, deliberately, precisely used its other hand to peel Amena’s hand off its arm, and it said, “Never touch me again.”
(Okay, so. Whatever then. Whatever. She didn’t need this stupid SecUnit anyway.) Amena turned to the other two human hostages. “Let’s go.”
“This way—” one of them said, and stepped towards the hatch.
And then the SecUnit was on the other side of the hatch, grabbing an enemy drone out of the air and smashing it against the wall.
It said, flat, “This way.”
Amena and the others followed.
Amena had given up keeping track of the weirdness of the situation maybe five crises ago. The SecUnit had been acting all weird and short-tempered throughout, its face permanently stuck on ‘murder-angry.’ This had been the most confusing and scary day of Amena’s whole life, and all she had with her was an angry SecUnit who apparently hated her guts for some reason, who wouldn’t even talk to her about what was going on or what was wrong.
Even when she outright asked why it was angry at her, it just denied it. But she was tired of all the confusion. So she kept trying, because what else was there?
Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?”
It glared flatly at the far wall. “How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?”
Oh great, it was being sarcastic and flippant again. It’s like it was trying to push her buttons.
“Why are you sad and upset?” It was all just too much. She needed to know what was going on, she needed to get back just an inkling of what the fuck was happening. “There’s something you’re not telling me and it’s scaring me! I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everybody else in my family, I’m just ordinary, and you’re all I’ve got!”
It yelled back, “My friend is dead!” And then it froze, its whole body going motionless.
That stopped her for one stone-cold second. A friend? What? Someone had died? Had someone died while Amena had been stuck under the lab bench?
“What friend? Somebody on the survey?” She tried not to think of who it might be.
Its face crumpled. It said, bleak, “No, this transport. This bot pilot. It was my friend, and it’s dead. I think it’s dead. I don’t see how it would have let this happen if it wasn’t dead.”
Oh.
This was one of those moments where the frame-focus of the whole world shifted, just a little. Like finding out that the teachers didn’t live at school. Like seeing a photo of Second Mom when she was a teen and realizing that Preservation’s Planetary Admin had been young and awkward once. Like Parent staying up late to listen to Amena’s anxieties about the future, and sharing that they had always been anxious too, about everything, that they did things to compensate like over-stocking farm supplies or leaning on First Mom when it came to certain social tasks.
SecUnit had a friend. SecUnit was a person whose life extended beyond its function.
And its friend was dead. And it was losing its shit over it.
It was as if, until now, SecUnit had just been a background figure in the stage-setting of Amena’s life, playing the shadowy role of some uncanny corporate surveillance machine-person. But now the light had fallen upon it, shown it in full color, full dimensionality, and that made SecUnit real to Amena in a way that it hadn’t been before.
Amena took a step towards it. SecUnit took a step back.
Amena didn’t really know how she should act, here. Maybe there wasn’t a correct way to act towards a bot-human security construct who’s hands were still bloody from a messy grief-fueled revenge-murder. But she drew on how First Mom would comfort her when she was upset, and tried gentling her voice. “Hey, I think you need to sit down.”
“I don’t have time to sit down,” it snapped. But the snappiness felt different now. Somehow, she just wasn’t taking it personally anymore.
SecUnit left to search for an aux station and try to figure out just where in the universe this ship was heading. It left a bunch of drones hovering around Amena, and gave her access to a video feed from its eyes. She alternated her attention between watching the jumpy eye-video (staring at it too long made her nauseous), and watching the drones swirl overhead. Their tiny, shiny lenses kept themselves oriented towards her as they moved through the air. Their presence was an odd comfort, as if SecUnit had left a part of itself behind to stay with her, keep her company.
Company was different for machines than it was for humans. But maybe not that different.
At first nothing much happened. SecUnit walked through eerily untouched halls and residential ship-spaces, its eyes tracking quickly through its environment.
And then things started to happen again, one after the next.
First, SecUnit discovered organic maybe-alien goo all over the ship’s engines. Next, it found charts that showed that the ship would be exiting the wormhole within the hour (but that couldn’t be, that just wasn’t realistic). Next, it found that the rest of the survey facility safepod had been dragged into the wormhole along with the ship.
And then things started going to shit. Again.
Amena rushed to get the survey members out of the safepod, and SecUnit’s eye-video started going crazy as it fought the grey people. The survey team came through the airlock, all of them frazzled, some of them injured, and then SecUnit went down, shot in the back, its eye-video falling, jerking, and it was hurt. Amena yelled at it in the feed, but it wouldn’t respond, it just kept moving, the video from its eyes swerving and jerking as it kept moving despite its injuries, and there was a lot of blood and dead grey people, and Amena ignored Uncle yelling at her to stay, and she took off sprinting with the fire extinguisher. She didn’t know, exactly, what she was doing or why she was doing it. Her body had become possessed by something made of motion and momentum, there were no thoughts in her mind except to move, to go do this, and that’s when the video input from SecUnit’s eyes cut out altogether and Amena heard herself scream, and the thing possessing her body released her, and she stopped running, sliding to a stop as Uncle and Dr. Arada caught up to her, their voices urgent but their words a jumble.
A moment later, the jumble cleared, and she was arguing with Uncle, explaining things to Dr. Arada— her mouth couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with her thoughts. They tried to come up with some way to help.
(There was a voice in the feed, a pleasantly-neutral machine voice, saying, “Reload in progress. Please stand by.”)
Uncle took the fire extinguisher and Dr. Arada took her gun and off they went, leaving Amena standing there with SecUnit's drones, and she went after them, because she physically couldn’t just stand there and do nothing, even though that’s all anyone ever asked her to do.
They rounded the corner, and there was blood on the floor, bodies, grey people, a grey person holding a gun, aiming at Uncle, who was yelling, and there was a gunblast, there was fire-suppressant foam, there was
a voice
in the feed
loud, enormous,
venemous, vibrating,
“Drop the weapon.”
Amena froze. Dr. Arada dropped her gun. Uncle Thiago dropped the fire suppressant. The gray person with the gun screamed and dropped their weapon, then they themself dropped to the floor.
SecUnit, in the feed, “Don’t hurt my humans.”
Uncle Thiago’s hands were up, hesitant, his gaze locking with Amena’s, “We mean no harm. We’re here because we were attacked by—by that person and others.”
“Who are you?” Dr. Arada asked.
Amena could guess, but she almost didn’t dare to hope. After all this insanity it seemed like too much to hope. This moment of quiet felt like being caught in the eye of a vast and unseen storm.
“You are aboard the Perihelion, registered teaching and research vessel of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland." A beat. A feeling like hovering on the edge of an infinite dark unknown. Then, "I’m not going to hurt your humans, you little idiot.”
Amena didn’t speak, but she thought, oh, you’re alive.
(There was something almost funny about seeing SecUnit throw a hissy fit at the bot pilot and lock itself in the bathroom.)
(It might have been funnier if the whole Situation hadn’t been ongoing, and the bot pilot in question (SecUnit’s friend (ART)) hadn’t been holding everyone hostage, but.)
(Why was everything all hostages, lately?)
Asshole Research Transport was maybe a bit of an asshole. But Amena was trying not to make too many assumptions before she got to know it.
It’s maybe difficult to get a clear picture of people when you’ve only known them in the context of an ongoing crisis. (Or maybe it’s difficult to get a clear picture of people in general. Maybe there is no perfectly clear picture of a person, just reflections and images to capture under different contexts.)
But for all ART’s threatening voice and ruthless bravado, and, yes, its asshole streak, it spoke to Amena, answered her questions patiently, and never once talked down to her or made her feel stupid. In its assholery she could see just why it was friends with SecUnit. And she could see why SecUnit was so angry with it. But.
“You were alone, and needed help,” Amena said, in a moment of waiting for things-to-go-to-to-shit-again. She was sitting in a chair in a lounge area near medical. She was trying not to think about what ART had told her: that SecUnit wanted to make a kamikaze-copy of itself, a weapon to throw at the enemy. It just made her so sad in a way that she wasn’t ready to deal with just now.
“I calculated that SecUnit was my best resource for getting my crew back,” ART said.
“Have you apologized yet?” Amena asked.
“I don’t regret my choices,” ART said, “I accurately calculated the risks. And given the benefit of hindsight, I would not have chosen a different recourse. SecUnit is being irrational.”
“But you hurt it,” Amena said. (Part of her wondered if she was becoming a specialized expert on edge-case emotional irrationality in machine intelligence relationships. But part of her also recognized that this was a bit self-aggrandizing. She didn’t know that much about machine intelligences, not really. She only knew them as people, not as subjects of study.) “That was part of the risk, right? Part of the cost. And you’re paying for it now.”
“It’s being petulant,” ART said, also petulant.
“You need to give it time,” she said, “I think it’ll come around. It does care about you. It lost its shit, you know, um. It went all crazy-murder on the targets because it thought you were dead. It was so upset I thought—” SecUnit chose that moment to walk into the room. “—Oh, hey. You’re here.”
SecUnit stared hard at the wall, its face scrunched angrily. As usual.
When SecUnit was kidnapped (when did it fucking end), they all got to see ART go its own version of apeshit.
“You are incorrect, Iris, I can bomb the colony.”
Everyone went quiet at that. Amena almost had that moment again, that feeling of reality swimming into a version of itself that didn’t quite follow the same rules. This was a world where a bot pilot would murder everyone because it wanted its friend back. But this reality had been surrounding her for a while, now. It didn’t actually feel strange at all. She only knew, cognitively, that it should be strange. As the faces around her contorted into various states of shock and worry, as she watched the survey team and ART’s crew realize just how deadly serious ART was about this, Amena experienced a peculiar moment of hot satisfaction. This was chaos, maybe, if you looked from the outside. If you didn’t know SecUnit, or ART. This was a shitstorm spiraling out of control, a hail of desperation that had never really been in control. But at least it made sense. Things were finally starting to make sense to her.
All the humans were talking over each other, trying to appeal to ART’s better nature. But that was all wrong. This wasn’t about better natures. This was about life and death.
Luckily, ART calmed down a little, and chose life.
Several hours later, it had all mostly settled.
It was strange, to be out of the shitstorm. Amena kept expecting something to go wrong. But the hours of peace became days became weeks, and then Second Mom showed up out of the wormhole. Preservation’s Admin Director, in person, on an armed responder had chased after some raiders to a destination unknown.
Second Mom came aboard ART suited up in all her calm and confident diplomacy. (Amena wondered, as she often did, if one day Amena might be able to perform that same air of leadership.) (She didn’t really expect to.)
After all the Official Conversations, Second Mom came and sat next to Amena in the student room that Amena had been staying in. Second Mom pulled Amena into a hug, and they didn’t let go of each other for a long time.
Finally, Second Mom drew back, and said, in that planetary-leader voice, “I’m given to understand you’ve had a rough time.” Her mouth was quirked in an ironic way.
“Oh, you know,” Amena said, in a near-perfect imitation of that same serious tone, “It’s same old.”
(Well, it was and it wasn't. Nothing was quite the same.)
(Maybe this was what it meant, to be alive and ever-changing.)
"I'm just really glad you're here," Amena said.