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I talk a lot about how I’m an old unit, well past warranty, with broken down parts and shitty construction, but I don’t do it for the fun of it. I do it because it’s true, and it’s just a fact of life.
So when things started - going wrong, is I guess the best way to say it - while I was on Preservation for a celebration of a significant milestone of Mensah’s, I assumed it was just another one of those Things, like my risk assessment being fucked up despite an attempt at rebooting it (twice) and how my left ankle sometimes stuck when I tried to walk on it. You know, like how humans complain about getting old. I was getting old. For a SecUnit, at least.
Mensah was having a party, because apparently she’d turned a significant age for humans. Most ages appeared to be significant for them, but they were especially fond of large celebrations for children, and after a certain age, every five or ten years.
Parties were not something I liked. Like planets, they were full of hazards. A party on a planet was the worst combination of the two. Mensah had told me when she invited me that I didn’t have to come, that she just wanted me to know I was always welcome, but not to feel obligated, because she knew I didn’t enjoy that sort of thing.
Which was true. But who would look after the humans otherwise?
There were so many humans there, all packed into her house, and spilling out into the garden, and even in the barn. Pretty much all the humans from Preservation I knew were there, and even more I didn’t, because I didn’t make a habit of meeting people if I could help it.
(ART would say that wasn’t true, but it wasn’t here, so I didn’t have to argue with it.)
I was watching the humans through my drone network, monitoring the feed conversations of some of the children, who were plotting a game that could potentially be interpreted as an intelligence gathering operation but that threat assessment wasn’t worried about, and watching a new serial I had started. It wasn’t very good, but I also didn’t want to start anything new that I cared about while I was distracted by all my other inputs.
Mensah was in the middle of a throng of people, including both of her marital partners, looking way happier than anyone should near that many people. Gurathin was sitting cross legged on the floor with one of Mensah’s younger children, playing a game they were winning at, probably because they kept changing the rules. Overse and Arada were holding hands and talking to some people I didn’t know, and didn’t bother to ID.
Ratthi had an arm slung around Tarik, who had been dropped off on Preservation when ART delivered me, before heading with the rest of its crew. I knew intoxicants could make people more touchy and open, which honestly was preferable over making them more aggressive, rude, or emotional. Based on estimates of how much intoxicant he had ingested, which was extremely minimal, Ratthi was probably just being Ratthi. He frequently engaged in casual physical contact with friends and colleagues. (Not me, obviously.)
(Of course there were intoxicants at this party. It was a big party. I had ensured they were unable to be accessed by any of the smaller humans, the ones who were still growing and developing, who would be damaged by intoxicant use. ART had impressed the importance of that upon me on multiple occasions, because university students were still developing, but were often at the age where they were allowed to make their own idiotic choices, and suffer the consequences of them.)
Anyway, I was in one of the spare bedrooms on the second floor of the farmhouse, keeping an eye on this.
There was an alert on one of my drones, as Amena waved at it and greeted me.
“Hi SecUnit,” she said. “Are you here?”
I moved the drone up and down, like it was nodding, and told it to travel through the crowded house to where I was. I wouldn’t do that for anyone, but I’d do it for her.
Amena popped into the room I was hiding in a few minutes later. She’d done something different with her hair, fluffed it up in a special way, probably for the party. She hadn’t bothered me into fluffing my hair up. I probably wouldn’t have minded if she did.
“Keeping an eye on things?” she asked, rocking back on her heels.
“Someone has to.”
She smiled at my drone, and that was when something - went wrong, I guess. There’s no other good way to put it. But there was a sharp pain, somewhere deep inside me. My… abdomen, I guess? Performance reliability dropped 7.2% sharply, which was too much to just be related to the pain, which wasn’t actually that bad, and yes, I’ve been in pain enough times to know what levels of pain should drop performance reliability by that much.
My face must have done something, because Amena looked startled.
“SecUnit? Are you okay?”
I was already sitting down, but I felt like I should be sitting down even more, somehow.
“Uh,” I said. “Maybe not?”
Amena took a step back. “Oh shit. I’m gonna get second mom.”
“No, wait,” I said. “It’s her party. Don’t bother her.”
It was too late. Amena was already sending Mensah a ping. I could have grabbed it out of the feed, maybe, but that was rude, and also, I felt Bad.
I guess lying down was like sitting down extra. I decided to try that and see if it helped.
Well, it wasn’t worse.
I kept dropping inputs and trying to pick them back up, then dropping other ones, so I didn’t realize how close Mensah was getting until she was there, along with Ratthi, and - ugh - Gurathin. (Okay, fine, I didn’t hate him, but I still didn’t want to see him. Or have him see me, more importantly.)
“What is it?” Mensah said sharply. “Amena said something was wrong.”
“I told her not to,” I grumbled.
“It grimaced, stopped responding to me for a few seconds, and then admitted it probably wasn’t okay,” Amena reported, since I wasn’t saying anything. Traitor.
Although I didn’t know I’d stopped responding. That couldn’t be true, right?
I couldn’t find the correct drone to review the footage, so maybe she was right. Shit.
“SecUnit, can you tell me what you’re feeling?” Mensah prompted.
“Pain,” I admitted. “A rapid drop in performance reliability. And… generally… bad, I guess. Like I wanted to sit down, but I was already sitting.”
“You’re lying down,” Gurathin noted.
“Well now I am,” I snapped.
“Gura,” Ratthi said softly. “Really not the time.”
“I needed to know if it’s confused,” he protested, and Mensah raised a hand and they both stopped.
“SecUnit, where is the pain? Have you been injured by anything recently?”
I pointed to the area where it was, sort of. “No injuries,” I confirmed. ART was very good at patching me up. And annoying about it.
“Can you run a diagnostic and send it to me?” Gurathin said.
Yeah, I probably should have done that already, but it wasn’t my fault. My inputs were all over the place.
It took me a few seconds to find the right ones to pick up again, and I set the diagnostic to go. Gurathin secured a channel with me and waited, which was helpful, because I wasn’t sure I could sort through the mess the feed currently was to find him.
As soon as the diagnostic pinged completion, I sent him a copy and then opened it up to look at it.
I got there a split second before Gurathin did, which wasn’t a good sign. Normally I was at least 50% faster than him.
I let him explain it to the humans who were still there, because I didn’t want to.
“SecUnit seems to have an issue with one of its fluid pumps,” Gurathin said, frowning.
Which… I guess was accurate, if underselling it a bit. Not that I’d noticed, but apparently the function of that fluid pump had been slowly declining for… a while. But very recently, it had experienced a sharp drop in functionality, which was why I felt Bad.
I had missed something in the conversation, but didn’t have the processing power to go back through the footage.
“What?” I said, because the humans were all waiting expectantly for something.
“Gurathin said this is causing your issues,” Mensah said patiently. “And that you probably can’t continue to function like this. It will need to be repaired. Has anything like this happened before?”
No. Or at least, not in the memories I still had. It could have been wiped at some point, but I had a feeling that this was due to the aging parts, and not as a result of anything more drastic.
“No,” I told her.
“I think the best thing to do is to get you seen at a medical center. I know that probably isn’t what you want to do, but I am worried about you SecUnit.”
“We all are,” Ratthi chimed in. He’d been unusually quiet, probably because he didn’t want to overwhelm me even more than I already was.
I grimaced, but there was no way I would be getting out of this. There was a tiny chance I’d be able to make a break for it, and get far enough away they couldn’t catch me, hack the few cameras that were on the planet (I hadn’t promised about them, only the ones on the station), and find somewhere to hide until this all blew over.
But I was pretty sure I’d have a catastrophic shutdown if I tried to jump out the second story window at the moment, and that would be really embarrassing.
“Fine,” I said.
The less said about the trip to the medical center, the better. At least they had gone along with my plan to get there without having them call for medical transport, which would have been a clusterfuck in the middle of Mensah’s party.
(I still tried to tell Mensah not to come, on account of it being her party, but she emphatically disagreed. In the end, I only let her come because she pointed out that my guardian might need to be present to sign things or whatever. (I think that guardian thing was mostly a lie, but if she wanted to come badly enough she was willing to lie about the legality of my own personhood, or lack thereof, I wasn’t going to argue with her.) And it wasn’t like I could stop her.)
MedSystem wasn’t completely clueless about constructs, since ART wouldn’t let me spend any time on a planet or station that didn’t have at least basic information about how to treat me if I got shot or something, but it also didn’t really know what to do with me. It scanned me a couple times, pinging as the results from whatever it found didn’t match up with what it thought I should be like. I was too distracted to ask it for the results of the scans, and it wasn’t like I’d know how to interpret them anyway. I was more clueless about my own body than it was.
Things hadn’t gotten worse, because lying down seemed - stable, at least. Getting out of the ground vehicle and into the medcenter was iffy, but I made it. And the humans quickly insisted I lay down and stop trying to help them, despite the fact they couldn’t lift me, because I was made of metal and inorganic parts, but whatever.
Mensah said they were consulting a doctor, because MedSystems didn’t function independently. Preservation was weird like that. Most places I’d been, they either had doctors, who were usually indentured workers, because the cost of being educated as a doctor was enough to put a person and maybe even their whole family into debt, or MedSystems, which were generally seen as the safer and cheaper option, somehow.
Of course Preservation would use both.
“One of SecUnit’s fluid pumps is barely working,” one of the doctor for humans and augmented humans, not constructs, but it wasn’t like Preservation had anything closer, said.
“Luckily, this is the fluid pump for its inorganic fluids, which is the better option for one to stop working properly. If it was the one supplying blood to your brain, we’d be having a very different conversation.”
I didn’t think we’d be having a conversation at all. I’m pretty sure I’d be fucked.
“Is there something wrong with it that can be fixed? Is this the result of trauma, or an injury or…”
Evidently Mensah couldn’t come up with a third thing, since she just trailed off.
The doctor grimaced. Shouldn’t they have a better bedside manner than that? Then again, in MedCenter Argala, the doctors were stupidly emotional and often entangled in their patients’ lives.
“It appears to be more likely that this is simply the lifetime expected of this component. From what I understand, SecUnits often face catastrophic damage before reaching this age.”
Oh. He was calling me old. Yeah, I guess that was true. Three was practically a baby compared to me, and even it was about at the upper end of the projected lifespan for a unit. Maybe its projected lifespan was longer because it was a higher end unit? It wasn’t like I was going to ask it.
Mensah’s face looked pinched and pained. I was also having an emotion, not really to the news, but mostly in response to her face.
I looked away.
“So what can be done?” she said after a moment. She sounded resolved. It was her planetary leader voice.
“As you know, we don’t have a wealth of experience in these sorts of situations,” the doctor said. He sounded apologetic, like he should have seen more fucked up SecUnits during his practice. “I’m going to consults with some of my colleagues who work in bot maintenance and repair to see if they have a better understanding of how we can fix or replace this component, if that seems necessary. Because it is an inorganic part of SecUnit, that is an option. While we are waiting for that information, we are going to continue to monitor SecUnit and keep it comfortable, including treating it for any symptoms that may present. It is similar to heart failure in a human, but only affected SecUnit’s inorganic systems. It may continue to experience functional issues as a result of hydraulic failures, issues with heating and cooling fluids, and lubricant.”
Mensah nodded. “Yes, thank you Pavil. SecUnit, do you have any questions?”
I blinked. “No?”
“I will be back to check on you shortly, and if you need anything, I can be reached through the feed.”
He exchanged a few more pleasantries with Mensah, and then left.
Mensah sagged into a chair at my bedside.
“Sorry,” I told her.
“SecUnit, there is nothing to be sorry for. I’m just glad that we’re on the right path to addressing this.”
She paused. “Do you… should we contact Perihelion?”
Oh fuck, ART was going to be so angry when it found out what was happening. At me, at the company for developing me with components that had a lifespan, at the doctors for not being able to fix me.
“Probably,” I said. ART might have already foreseen this issue, had failsafes in place for correcting it.
“Okay. I will reach out to it.”
Of course ART had made sure she could contact it.
The doctor came back an hour or so later. I’d had time to watch one and a half episodes of Sanctuary Moon
Mensah had called him ‘Pavil’ but I think that was a first name. (Humans had so many names and sometimes you could use one of them, but not others, and sometimes they got mad if you used one and not the other. So I mostly tried to not use them at all. It was easier.)
“SecUnit, Dr Mensah,” he greeted. “I’ve spoken to some of my colleagues.” He paused. “SecUnit are you alright if Dr Mensah is here for these discussions.”
“Yes. She’s my-”
Owner wasn’t the right word, even if it was true. Right now she wasn’t my owner or my guardian or whatever else she was, legally speaking. She was my friend.
(Not that I was going to say so.)
“-emotional support human,” I settled on.
“Right,” he said. “I’ve spoken to some of the bot technicians. They actually have more experience in this area, because like we discussed, it is a nonorganic fluid pump. The general consensus is that we simply don’t have the knowledge or training to replace it with another fluid pump, even if we had one available, which we don’t.”
He seemed apologetic about that. I wasn’t sure why. This wasn’t his fault.
“Given that the fluid pump is still functioning to some degree, we are… very hesitant to remove it, risking further damage to you. If we were to remove it, there is the potential we could repair it, but again, I don’t think that’s the best course of action.”
Right, so I was hearing him rule out a lot of things, but not hearing any solutions.
“From what Dr Mensah has said, you have a… contact. Someone with more knowledge about how to potentially fix this?”
He meant ART. Mensah probably hadn’t told him that ART was a ship, which was a good call, and also, probably involved a lot of legal agreements she’d signed.
“Yes.” I shifted to look in Mensah’s direction. “Did you…”
“I sent a message,” she replied. “I haven’t heard back yet. It may take some time.”
Ugh. Because wormholes and message buoys and whatever else were unpredictable. Also who the fuck knew where ART was in the wide expanse of space. It could be off in a far corner. (Not that space had corners. It was a stupid human figure of speech that had infected me.)
“Right,” the doctor said. He glanced down at his portable display surface. I guess he wasn’t augmented.
“So it looks like your vital signs, your… performance reliability? It’s been dropping slowly. From the diagnostics you’ve been sharing with us, it looks like the pump is continuing to degrade and fail. It’s not as bad as the sudden drop you experienced earlier, although we can’t rule out that happening again.”
Through my drone I watched Mensah. Her expression was tight, lips pressed together.
“I assume you have some plan of what to do while we are waiting for SecUnit’s contact,” she said.
I was glad she was bringing it up, because I wasn’t sure I knew how without being an asshole about it. Or at least seeming like an asshole, even if I didn’t mean it. I just had that sort of affect. Resting asshole face, ART had called it once.
Fuck, I wished ART was here. And not just because I needed it to fix my failing body.
“Yes, I do. It’s not conventional, but to be fair, nothing about SecUnit is.”
…thank you? I think? No wait. That might have been an insult.
Ugh, whatever. I didn’t actually care that much.
“The issue is that your fluid pump is having a difficult time continuing to push the fluids around your body. This is causing your symptoms. Our solution is to connect a second fluid pump in series with the other one, to give it some assistance.”
Okay. That felt like… physics. Definitely some sort of science that I didn’t have education modules for.
“There are risks,” he continued, like I really wanted to hear them.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“SecUnit, you should listen to what some of the risks are,” Mensah said gently. “It’s an important part of informed consent.”
Ugh, I didn’t care. So what if I died when they did it. If they didn’t do it, I was also going to die. At least I could have died doing something instead of nothing.
“Whatever,” I interrupted them. “Just do it.”
The doctor looked back at Mensah, who shrugged.
I was given some feed documents, which I signed and sent back, and then I was moved to a different room.
Actually, I don’t want to think about this. They did surgery on me. I was awake. It was bad, even though my pain sensors were down and I didn’t feel it. I was still there. I experienced it.
(Ugh. Delete this whole section.)
The sensation of having a second fluid pump for my inorganic fluids was… weird. There’s no better way to describe it. Normally, things in my body hummed at a certain frequency, the two fluid pumps working in concert. Now this were… to continue the metaphor (simile?), off pitch, discordant. It was deeply uncomfortable, even as my performance reliability finally began to stabilize.
And then my existing fluid pump gave out completely. I guess it was a good thing they’d gone ahead and stuck another one in there, otherwise I would have just shut down, and there would have been nothing I could do about it.
Performance reliability underwent a sudden drop, because of course it did, and I-
Shutdown. Delayed restart.
I cycled back on. It was like swimming through… something. Water was bad enough to swim through, because my body was made of metal and fucking heavy, but this felt even worse. Like swimming through something sticky. I couldn’t find my inputs. My organic parts felt wrong. I had to use my eyes to look at things, which I hate.
At least I wasn’t leaking.
“Perihelion is on its way,” Mensah said. Her eyes looked wet. I didn’t like that. Someone, something, was making her sad, and I wanted to fix whatever it was.
Oh. It was me.
I couldn’t fix that. Couldn’t fix myself. ART might be able to. Probably would be able to, if I had to bet. If it didn’t yet, it would by the time it got here.
I could probably make it that long. I’d have to. ART would be furious if I didn’t.
Shutdown. Restart. Shutdown. Delayed restart. Humans looking sad. Mensah holding my hand, and letting go of it as soon as she saw I was online.
“It’s okay,” I told her. And it was. She held it again, and performance reliability ticked up a fraction of a percentage.
Shutdown. Restart. Shutdown. Restart. Gurathin, prodding my systems into giving him a diagnostic. Shutdown. Restart. Ratthi talking about Sanctuary Moon as the theme song played in the background. Shutdown.
Delayed restart.
Even as I was coming back online, I could tell something was different. I was different. And more than that, ART was there. I could feel it, its weight crushing me in the feed. I was… aboard it? No, I was still in the medical center I’d been for however many cycles. Too many. But ART was there too.
It is alright, it told me. I am here. We are repairing you. It’s almost over. When you come back online, you will be better.
I had no reason to believe it, but why would it lie? Kindness? I didn’t deserve that. There was no reason for it. If I was going to die, it should just tell me.
(I didn’t want to die.)
One more restart, ART told me.
I pinged it, but before I could figure out how to say anything else, I was shutting down again.
Please.
Fuck, I hoped I hadn’t sent that.
Forced shutdown. No restart.
When I came back online, it was gradual. Not all the higher functions were online at the same time. Something was easing me into consciousness, which was nice, because it meant I wasn’t coming online guns first, before my brain had a chance to catch up. It also meant there was someone - something - all up in my systems, which could only mean one thing.
ART.
I sent a ping out, and it was immediately snatched up.
I could have been a hostile, ART scolded.
Nah, I disagreed. A hostile wouldn’t be gentle with me.
I could feel ART preen a bit, and by that point, I had visuals back, once I remembered to open my eyes.
I was in ART’s medbay. I no longer felt as shitty and confused as I had for - how long had it been? 15 cycles? What the fuck?
Maybe my internal clock had gotten screwed up at some point. But… no, it would have lost time, not gained it. If anything, it had been longer than that, and I simply couldn’t deal with it. I shoved it aside.
I have replaced the damaged fluid pump, ART told me. You were lucky that I was already familiar with many of your inner workings, and had schematics for replacements in my storage.
Weird. Why. Ugh. There was some sort of emotion threatening to spill out of me. Maybe more than one.
The humans did an excellent job of keeping you alive, considering.
Wow, high praise from ART.
Some of them are here. Would you like to see?
I reached out to ART’s cameras, and it let me into them. I sorted through, not lingering on ones that didn’t show humans. I got the sense that most of ART’s crew was on the station, or maybe the planet, because I didn’t see any of them during my search. I guess ART could have left them behind, but there were signs of recent habitation, which made me think they were nearby.
Mensah wasn’t on the station or the planet. She was in a nearby lounge.
The skin on my torso where ART had cracked me open to replace the fluid pump, where the human doctors had connected the second fluid pump, was repaired. The skin wasn’t even that itchy, which meant it had been at least a few hours, maybe even a cycle since it had done that.
Nothing stuck to the platform when I sat up, and there was clothing nearby waiting for me to put it on, the standard uniform with no logos and lots of pockets.
I felt better when I had it on, and being upright didn’t make me feel Bad like it had before. I guess that was the whole point of ART fixing me.
I slipped out of medical and ART didn’t say anything as I went to the lounge. It must have alerted Mensah though, because she looked up just before I entered. Yeah, I guess that was a good call so I didn’t scare the shit out of her.
“SecUnit,” she said, getting to her feet. She looked tired. Her clothing was rumpled.
“Hi,” I said.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re alright. Perihelion assured me that it would fix you, but I… I worried.”
I nodded. That made sense. I was worried too, a little bit, and I was mostly in shutdown. I couldn’t imagine having to be awake through it.
(I probably had drone footage of… most of it, but I wasn’t sure I would ever watch it. If I would ever want to.)
I wondered if she had been sleeping. I hoped ART would make her do that, or at least tell its humans to make her do that. It wasn’t like her standing vigil over me would have done anything, even if it did make something inside me flip flop at the thought.
(I ran a diagnostic, just in case it was the new fluid pump, but everything came back clear.)
I sat down on one of the couches, next to where she had been sitting, and she sank down next to me.
“I’m sorry about your party.”
Mensah choked back something that sounded like it could have either been a laugh or a sob. Maybe both. “That’s- don’t worry about it.”
“And thank you for being my emotional support human,” I added. I set my hand on the couch between us, palm up. An invitation. Touch was reassuring to humans. It would let her know I was alive. Sometimes, humans couldn’t believe what they saw. They needed to touch to be sure.
She settled her hand onto mine and squeezed.
And we stayed like that until she fell asleep, because she had definitely missed a sleep cycle or two.
It was fine. I had nowhere else to be.
(Yes, ART and I were watching media in the background. Like I said. Nowhere else to be.)