Chapter Text
I leaned against the seal of ART’s airlock as I watched the last installation worker scramble through. This had been maybe the easiest mission of my life. I hadn’t even been shot once. I know right?
The ratio of die hard corporates to corporates ready to split and run had been fairly low. Even the supervisors didn’t put up much of a fight. I guess being abandoned on a station slated to burn up in the atmosphere in the next 5-10 business cycles will do that to you.
“Where’s Three?” I asked as the worker passed me.
The worker startled, looking back at me with a mix of wariness and confusion, which I guess was fair. These people were all isolated installation workers. If a SecUnit ever addresses you directly in a mine, it's bad.
I sighed. “The SecUnit.”
The worker jumped a little and glanced back through the hatch. “Oh, the SecUnit told us to go ahead. I think it’s still back there,” they said before scampering off to blend in with the rest of their group.
The mission was a pretty simple evacuation mission. We’d responded to a distress call from workers trapped on a station with a decaying orbit. I know that sounds dire, but the workers had gone behind their supervisors’ backs to send the call earlier rather than later when they were actively burning up in the atmosphere. (I had a feeling their supervisors had turned a blind eye to the comms activity. No one had great confidence their company was going to arrive in time to save them all from a fiery death.)
We’d arrived with plenty of time to escort everyone off the station without any yelling or screaming or crying. It's always nice when I have time to do my job properly.
Arada, one more group of traumatized installation workers headed your way. Make sure everyone’s accounted for. I’m going back in to meet Three, I said, pushing myself off the wall and stepping over the threshold.
The emergency lighting throbbed, casting moving shadows on the ground. It made the whole place seem like it had been submerged under water. It was creepy, but entirely safe. I’d already been through the entire station and there were no space monsters (or combat bots) waiting to jump out at me.
Probably. You never know.
The halls weren’t sterile and pristine like you see in media. Human detritus littered the corridor, dirt ground into whatever obnoxious carpet pattern their company had chosen to make it seem like they gave a shit. This was their home, not a waystation. They didn’t live on the gas giant that swirled below them (that would be kind of hard) they lived up here, mining the rings surrounding the planet for precious ore. (Yes, that's as dangerous as it sounds.)
It also smelled.
Stations are pretty much just one big petri dish floating in the vacuum seal of space. I kicked an old shoe to the side, the blown out sole flopping open. I felt ART slide out of my feed as I continued deeper into the station. The connection on the station was really choked. There wasn’t enough bandwidth for a massive superintelligence to ride my inputs.
Location report, I sent Three on the feed. No response. I checked Three’s feed. I could see Arada’s feed, and Ratthi, Mensah, Amena, and all of ART’s crew, but Three’s was listed as offline.
If Three was a human, that would not be weird. Humans lost or misplaced their feed interfaces all the time, but Three was not a human and it's kind of hard to misplace something hard baked into your neural wiring.
Maybe Three was having connectivity issues. Like everything on this rancid petri dish, the feed was constantly malfunctioning. This station was built to keep out solar radiation. The walls were so thick the feed had to be run through physical cables to reach the whole station. If the physical relay was down in some part of the station, I wouldn’t be surprised if Three’s feed signal was having trouble getting through.
I rounded the next corner and spotted a black lump lying on the floor. I told my drones to fan out ahead of me to scout while I stopped to examine it. I bent down to pick it up. It was an intel drone. Probably one of the ones I’d lost earlier to a trigger happy supervisor. I flipped it over. Nope, one of Three’s. We had different brand preferences when it came to drones, and this definitely wasn’t one of mine.
I rubbed my thumb over the logo branded on its carapace. It didn’t look like it had been shot, it looked like it had just crashed. That should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. Drones don’t drop out of the sky for no reason. Did it run out of battery? That seemed unlikely, we hadn’t been out that long and Three was pretty good about charging its drones before a mission.
I put the dead intel drone into my pocket and crept forward with more caution. Up ahead, ScoutDrones One and Two reported four more dead drones scattered in the corridor.
I paused when I reached them, picking up each drone and flipping it over. Each one carried the triangular logo of Three’s preferred company and showed no sign of projectile damage. I stuffed them in my pockets and kept going.
My view expanded as ScoutDrones Five, Six, and Seven reached the next junction and fanned out. I stopped dead in my tracks and froze. It felt like someone had stuck a hand through my abdominal cavity and pulled out a fistful of my insides.
There were Three’s remaining seven drones, all scattered around the junction, and Three. It was wedged in the doorway, its mangled body twisted around the radiation door slammed into its chest.
I stepped into the junction, the whine of the door as it tried to close grating on my ears as I approached the body. Was it a body? Did dead SecUnit’s leave bodies behind, or were they just pieces of inert machinery? I decided I didn’t want it to be a body.
I stopped in the middle of the junction, still several meters away from where Three’s body was crushed in the door. Its chest was crumpled and fluid drained sluggishly from its mouth, eyes staring at the floor where its head lolled against its shoulder.
See, the problem with SecUnits is that until we repaired Three and tried to restart it, we wouldn’t know if it was dead. Was it dead? It looked pretty dead. SecUnits are pretty hard to kill but getting mashed by a radiation door would do it.
It was probably dead.
I pinged it, even though it was pretty clear I would get no response.
My organic parts hurt enough to make me wince. I did a quick check. I hadn’t been shot and forgot about it, and I wasn’t injured, so why were they doing that? My legs started to fold and I sank down onto the floor. I recalled all my drones and told them to stash themselves in my pockets. I think I was having another emotional collapse like the one I had when I thought ART was dead.
This is why SecUnits can’t be friends. It hurts too much. Either they’re killed, or one day the humans order you to kill them.
Performance reliability was taking a steady nosedive and something was happening in the organic bits of my brain, but I couldn’t tell what. I should probably stop looking at Three, but I couldn’t.
I opened the team feed and checked the signal. It was strong enough for me to send a message, but not much else. I need someone to come fix a door, I sent.
Matteo: On it.
Tarik: Do you want help? Those station doors can be pretty heavy.
Matteo: Sure.
Oh shit, I had to tell them about Three. I had to tell ART about Three. It was going to lose its mind if Three was dead. They were going to come down here and Three would still be smushed inside the door.
And a gurney, I sent. I paused and then added, And Ratthi. I know, I know, it was selfish of me. Out of all my humans, Ratthi was the squishiest. He absolutely did not need to see his friend smeared on the inside of a door jam.
Is someone hurt? Iris said, her ID popping into the feed.
I stared at Three, blood and viscous fluid streaking the arm hanging limp from its frame. I know this is really gross, but I was really hung up on it. I took an unnecessary breath. I think Three might be dead.
The feed exploded. The humans were making all sorts of shocked exclamations of grief that I tried to ignore and ART was trying to shove as much of itself through the choked feed connection as it could. It couldn’t fit much. All it could do was send messages.
What happened? ART demanded.
I hugged my knees to my chest, eyes still glued to Three, and said, I don’t know.
There was a pause.
Can I see? ART said.
The feed connection out here was so shitty I couldn’t just hand ART my visual inputs. I had to excerpt a still from my video footage and send it as a compressed data file through the feed.
One second turned into two, then three before stretching on into a whole minute. I sat there in the middle of the junction feeling like shit. I had no idea how to comfort it. I knew ART was upset. Like really, really upset, but through the stupid feed relay, I couldn’t feel anything.
Tarik, Matteo, and Ratthi will be there in a few minutes along with a gurney. I’ll prep Medical, ART said after a full 1.27 minutes. Its feed voice was muted and flat, there wasn’t a single drop of sarcasm in it. Then it did something ART never does, and shut up.
With its limited feed access ART couldn't ride my inputs like it usually did, so when it stopped talking I found myself totally and completely alone. I knew I should say something to it. Anything other than a stupid three word reply, but my mind was blank. I couldn’t sit around all cycle having an emotional collapse, so I untangled my limbs and pushed myself into a standing position. I was fine, this was fine. Three and I weren’t friends. I barely knew Three. I’d hardly spoken to it since it boarded ART. It was just another dead SecUnit and I’d seen plenty of those.
Except it wasn’t just another dead SecUnit. This was Three, and for some reason I really wanted it to be successful.
I stood there until the humans arrived like I was still governed and on duty. That’s how I was standing when Ratthi tapped my feed to let me know they’d arrived.
Send Tarik in first, I told him.
I heard rather than saw Tarik approach. All my drones were still snuggled in my pockets so if I wanted to look at something I’d have to use my actual eyes and my eyes were currently busy watching Three.
Behind me Tarik sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh fuck, that’s gruesome.”
I winced. I should have, I don’t know, warned him about it or something. It was pretty gruesome, and when I say gruesome I mean even I was grossed out by it and I’ve seen some pretty gorey stuff.
Tarik didn’t say anything else but I could feel him staring at me. I don’t know how I knew that since he was standing behind me and all my drones were asleep in my pockets, so I was probably just losing my sanity. Fantastic. Just what I needed.
The rapid fire exchange happening in the feed however was definitely real. Probably ART grilling Tarik for updates I was failing to give it.
Performance reliability ticked a few degrees lower. If the murderbot and ex-corporate death squad leader were grossed out by the mangled remains of Three’s body, the squishy Preservationer had no business being in here.
“I should send Ratthi back,” I said.
The rapid fire feed exchange stopped. “You know Ratthi, that will only make him more upset,” Tarik said.
“More upset than seeing his friend ground to a paste by a radiation door?” I said.
"SecUnit, Ratthi will want to be here for you," Tarik said gently.
Which wasn't a no.
I let Ratthi in anyway.
Ratthi made a little retching noise when he came in with Matteo, which didn’t make me feel better about myself. I knew I should have sent him back. I was a murderbot, I could handle this on my own.
“I know talking about your feelings is the last thing you want to do right now but—” I finally turned away from Three to look at Ratthi who put his hands up in a surrender gesture before finishing his sentence. Just seeing his face made my performance reliability tick up a few points. “—Is there anything you need right now?”
My face twisted and started doing something stupid. There was no wall for me to turn and face. I was standing in the center of the junction and every human in there was watching me, maybe not directly, but they were all waiting to see what I would do.
I was making them nervous, I could tell. My behavior was erratic, and no one likes it when their SecUnit starts acting weird. They were all treating me like a loose projectile. It was too much for one poor little murderbot to handle.
Ratthi was standing behind me and he was already pretty close, much closer than the nearest wall, so I turned to face him instead. Like most humans, Ratthi is much shorter than me. I had to duck my head a little to make sure my face was fully hidden from view, but it got the job done.
“Oh, no,” Ratthi said. His voice was right next to my ear. We weren’t touching, but I was close enough to feel the heat radiating off of his body. It was comforting. Now I know why upping my body temperature is the first step of my injured human protocols.
Ratthi’s hands came to hover over my back. I could tell because it was making my skin crawl. “Do you… Am I supposed to hug you, or...?” Ratthi trailed off nervously.
My mouth twisted downward. First I’d dragged Ratthi in here to look at the corpse of his dead friend. And for what? It wasn’t like I was going to let him hug me. And now I was scaring him with my stupid behavior.
They aren’t scared you’re going to hurt them. They can tell you’re upset and want to comfort you, but aren’t sure how. ART said. Even without riding my inputs, stuck in this stupid sensory deprivation chamber of a feed, ART still knew what I was thinking.
Tell them I’m fine, I said.
It would be okay to let them comfort you, ART said, without a hint of sarcasm. It didn’t even call me an idiot or anything. It was being nice and I didn’t know how to handle that. I had a feeling ART didn’t know how to comfort me either.
I should be comforting them. They liked Three more than I did, I said.
I’m not sure that’s true, ART said, and I couldn’t even be mad at it because it was still using its nice voice.
I shook my head, and Ratthi’s hands dropped. “Okay, SecUnit. Take as long as you need,” he said. See, this is why Ratthi is one of my favorites. He was perfectly fine with letting a whole murderbot use him as a stand in for a wall, and he wasn’t even going to hug me about it.
Ratthi smelled like his own brand of dirty socks. It was weirdly comforting. I didn’t know what to make of it either. It's not like perfume companies make a scent called ‘nostalgic sock.’
There was a click to my left, startling me into looking down. Gurathin blinked up at me, kneeling over the case of tools he’d just opened.
“I didn’t ask you to come,” I said. Yeah, that sounded kinda hostile. I didn’t mean for it to sound hostile, I was just surprised to see him.
I was also relieved. Weird, but true. As an ex-construct technician Gurathin knew more about putting mangled SecUnits back together than I did. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him to come in the first place.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Gurathin said. He didn’t tiptoe around my feelings like everyone else was doing, which made me feel better, but then he ruined it by adding, “I’m here to help.”
“We should get Three down first,” he said, when I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t move.
“SecUnit, we won’t know how bad the damage is until we can get it down to take a look at it,” Gurathin said in a low voice.
Right, yeah. Plan of action. I still had things I needed to be doing. I couldn’t just stand around having emotional collapses all day. Get it together Murderbot. You have a job to do.
I stepped away from Ratthi, pinged ART on the feed and glanced around the room. Matteo and Tarik were already working on the door, whispering to each other in hushed voices. The room looked strange, like my brain wasn’t processing the visual information right. All at once I had a significant portion of ART’s attention but it didn’t say anything.
We’re going to get Three down to properly assess the damage, then I’ll send it to Medical, I said.
ART said, Acknowledged. Medical has been prepped, even though it was a stupid report it should have grilled me mercilessly for. But I needed to say something to ART, even if I was just stating the obvious. It felt vastly insufficient. ART had gotten so attached to Three. I wasn’t kidding when I said it would lose its mind if a rock fell on it or something.
“Are you sure it’s dead?” Ratthi said
“No,” I said.
“Let’s not make any assumptions until we can get it down and have a look at it,” Gurathin said. The door gave one last jitter, pushing more fluid out of Three’s mouth, and then halted. Gurathin winced. Ratthi looked like he might throw up. My organics gave another twinge. It was wrong of me to ask Ratthi to come.
I pinged ART in the feed. It pinged me back. I said, I’m sorry I’m so shit at this. I didn’t specify what ‘this’ was, but ART knew what I meant.
I am not sure how best to comfort you either. This event is unprecedented, ART said. It tried to lean on me in the feed, but all the shitty relays managed to do was push some garbled code at me. I pushed some garbled code back, just to reciprocate.
This sucks, I said. I could have been talking about the feed relays, but ART knew what I was talking about.
It does, ART agreed.
“How could something like this happen?” Ratthi murmured next to me, the horror still audible in his voice.
I would like to know that too Ratthi. This had been one of the safest missions I’d ever been on, right up until I found the SecUnit working under me mashed in a door.
“It was probably an accident,” I said. I didn’t believe that for a second, but I didn’t have any evidence of foul play other than a bad feeling and an inherent distrust of corporates. In my pocket, I ran my thumb over the triangular logo on Three’s drone.
“The door is about to come clear!” Matteo shouted, bringing everyone’s attention back to the situation at hand.
“Shit! Support its neck when it falls,” Gurathin said.
Gurathin’s instructions turned out to be unnecessary. Three did not fall when the door slid back. It had been ground so thoroughly into the door jam that we had to scrape it out. Eventually with the help of Tarik, Gurathin and I were able to get it down.
When it finally came free, I caught it against my chest, bringing us both to the floor in a sort of controlled fall. I made sure to grab its neck, locking my hand around it like a brace to keep it still.
I laid it out on the floor, careful not to jostle its neck as I disengaged. I folded my legs underneath me and sat next to it. Now that it was down, I could fully assess the damage. Its chest and pelvic area were crumpled and its left shoulder had been reduced to paste that oozed through bits of shredded skin where it had exploded under pressure. One leg had been caught in the track shoving the metal frame through its thigh and pulverizing its foot.
My eyes traveled over Three’s face and I startled when I locked eyes with it. Three had shut down so fast that its eyes were still open. I don’t like making eye contact with alive things and this was so much worse.
It was like a ping echoing in an empty feed. Like when ART had been deleted by targetControl. Just a big empty space where someone important used to be.
I couldn’t look away.
My organics felt bad, like really bad and performance reliability sent me an alert.
“Can you fix it?” I asked Gurathin. It was a pitiful question, but everyone was nice enough not to comment on it.
“Maybe, maybe not. We won’t know until we repair it and try to turn it back on,” Gurathin said in a gentle tone of voice I don’t think I had a previous file of for comparison.
To my left the powered stretcher ART had sent beeped at us impatiently, reminding everyone that it had a patient to attend to. Careful to steady its head, I gathered Three up in my arms and placed it on the stretcher. The stretcher was perfectly capable of moving under its own power, but I escorted it all the way to Medical anyway.