Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It’s the fourth and final day of a convention for all the elite, high-flying assholes in the world of corporate venture capitalism, where my owner, Mareed, had dragged us in the hopes of being mistaken for someone important. He’d convinced himself that it would be a great networking opportunity—that he would make connections with powerful, influential people who would open new doors for him, etc. And for someone smarter and more charismatic than Mareed, I’m sure it could have been.

But because this is Mareed, and he’s an addict who is very good at convincing himself that the best thing to do is the thing he wanted to do anyway, he’s skived off early for the fourth evening in a row to go to a gambling club, and for the past five hours has been steadily losing hard currency.

This is such typical behavior for him that I long ago stopped bothering to have feelings about it.

The club, called the Santorini, is one of the nicer establishments on TyMarraTen Station. It has elegant mood lighting in a perpetual early-evening glow, and sound buffers that keep the ambient noise lively and congenial instead of overwhelming, so plenty of other convention attendees have been coming here in the evenings too. If Mareed could have dragged his attention off the tables for five minutes, he could have joined them in the posturing and dick-measuring that passes for making friends in this crowd.

(Or possibly not; these people have a well-developed sense for telling a good bet from a bad one, and Mareed is a bad bet. He’s too credulous, too easily overawed, too desperate to impress—they can tell instantly that he’s a mark, not a peer. I see the calculating looks as they size him up, as if gauging how many pieces they could carve him up into, and how much those pieces would sell for.

Inevitably accompanied by a glance at me, estimating my sell price too.)

In any case, that’s why I’d been doing my best to dissociate through the experience, until I register that the conversation currently taking place—between Mareed and the club owner, a high femme named Anara—is about me.

Namely, that Mareed owes six thousand credits to the house, has only twenty three in his pocket, and Anara isn’t going to let him walk out the door until his ledger’s been cleared. He has three hours to magic up six thousand credits, or else she’s taking me as payment-in-kind.

Well. It’s not like I hadn’t known this was happening soon—I just move up my internal timeline to this is happening tonight. And then, since there’s nothing I can do about it, I try to hit the sweet spot of not-paying-attention where I’m still responsive enough not to get dinged by the governor module, without actually having to think about the things that are happening to me.

Unfortunately there is no tuning out sudden physical pain, when Mareed abruptly grabs a handful of my hair and drags me off the club floor into a side corridor. We’re in the hallway that leads to the club’s back rooms, semi-private, or private enough that Mareed feels comfortable venting his ire on me here.

“You,” he hisses, his hand in my hair forcing me to curl into an awkward crouch. “This is all your fault. You’re bad luck. Everything was great until you came along.”

That is demonstrably untrue, since he was wretched with money even before he made the ill-advised decision to buy me, and I had no part in his finances getting worse since. But that’s not what people who buy sexbots want to hear.

“Yes, Master,” I gasp out penitently, submitting meekly to the abuse. “I’m sorry, Master.”

(It should go without saying that clients get to choose how we address them, and that their choice sometimes tells you a lot about them. Not that I really care, to be honest, because what I call them makes no difference to the material reality of my life.)

He yanks me around by the hair, and sets to slapping me back and forth with his open palm and the back of his hand. It stings, but probably won’t even bruise—Mareed has no calculated interest in inflicting pain, just wants a physical outlet for his anger, and so the blows are an imprecise, inefficient use of his strength.

“You worthless, bad-luck, whore—!”

“I’ll buy it off you,” says a new voice, effortlessly cutting through Mareed’s tantrum.

Mareed pauses, and we both turn to look up at the newcomer—a ridiculous tableau, with his fist in my hair forcing me to bend nearly double, while I cock my head at an awkward angle.

There’s a man lounging in the entrance to the hallway, a drink held carelessly in one hand. I recognize his face from previous nights, another convention attendee who’s been coming to the Santorini for after-hours socializing. He’s not one of the people who’s rented me from Mareed for short-term use, so I haven’t interacted with him directly, but he’s wound up at the same table as us often enough that I’ve built up a profile from his interactions—and what it told me is that he is bad fucking news.

In this ecosystem comprised of grifters and the gullible, I’d pegged him squarely as the former, a liar with a whiff of violence coming off him. Now he’s watching us, and a casual observer might have read his face and posture as lazily uninterested, but a ComfortUnit’s behavioral analysis module is not a casual observer. He looks like he’s springing a trap.

“What?” Mareed says dumbly.

The man nods toward me, “Your bad-luck bot. I’ll take it off your hands.”

I don’t know if Mareed recognizes him, even though they’ve played next to each other a few times. The man has a dangerous, predatory aspect to him, a physical readiness even when he’s ostensibly relaxed, his eye movements (augmented in some way) betraying a far more acute situational awareness than the club’s other oblivious patrons.

Oblivious like Mareed, who’d been unable to see beyond the man’s confidence and obvious wealth (understated in style, but his clothes were the kind of unique, handcrafted pieces that are made outside the Corporation Rim and imported at dizzying expense), and impressed by the “investment opportunities” that this man dangled before him like bait. Mareed hadn’t noticed how the man eyed him when he wasn’t looking—cold, assessing glances like he was trying to decide whether to swindle him or slit his throat.

I could have told Mareed that he was out of his depth, that this man would eat him alive, but constructive criticism tends to fall on deaf ears.

“Eight thousand credits,” the man says. “Hard currency, on the spot.”

That is such a breathtaking undervaluation of what I’m worth (literally, an order of magnitude less than my MSRP) that I’m trying to figure out what he meant by it—whether he genuinely doesn’t know how much a ComfortUnit is supposed to cost; whether that was intended as an insult to Mareed; or whether he thinks Mareed doesn’t know either. In any case, I’m almost impressed by his audacity.

Mareed sputters with indignation. “I paid ten times that for it!”

The man shrugs. “Maybe. But you’re not getting ten times that tonight.” His expression goes from conversational to calculating. “Because I just heard Anara say that you have three hours to come up with six thousand credits. Frankly, I thought eight thousand was being generous.” He lets that sit for a beat and then adds meaningfully, “It’s a better offer than anyone else here would make you, if they knew.”

And if Mareed won’t sell me to him, he’ll make sure everyone else does know—that implicit threat is clear enough for even Mareed to pick up on.

Strictly speaking, Mareed could get a better offer. If he managed to rope a few interested parties into a bidding war, he could probably get at least 20k for me… but the trade-off would be that everyone in the club—all of these high-flyers whom Mareed wants to regard him as a peer—would witness him groveling for their money, desperate and destitute. The humiliation alone would be difficult enough to bear, but beyond that, it would be a death blow to his professional ambitions.

When Mareed’s choices are either to let Anara claim me and walk away with nothing, or abase himself trying to pawn his sexbot in the middle of the club, then suddenly the prospect of cutting a quiet deal with this man is looking like his least-worst option.

“Now let’s not be hasty,” Mareed says, putting on a smile that attempts to be ingratiating. He finally lets go of my hair. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement. Say, fifteen thousand?”

Oh, that was a bad counter offer—this man paid more than that for the shirt he’s wearing. I’m dead certain he’d been prepared to go much higher, and sure enough, the microexpression that flits over his face is disbelief, that Mareed’s making it this easy.

But he just tips his head toward one of the unoccupied backrooms. “Let’s talk business.”

I do my best not to be mentally present for the negotiations, although part of me does find it distantly funny to hear Mareed struggling to come up with reasons why my sell price should be higher, after he’s spent the past six months slagging me off as a worthless waste of money. I’m mostly ignoring him, since he’s about to become irrelevant to my life, and instead using the time to covertly study my soon-to-be-new-owner.

According to his feed profile, his name is Muaz Benzakour, age thirty; his gender is listed as masc, his profession as “broker,” and his corporate affiliation as “independent,” which I take to mean that he’s a freelancer who’s not above some opportunistic con artistry. Nothing about ethnic identity, system of origin, current system of residence, or religious adherence, just that his sexual interest is “panspectrum” and that he’s available for “casual liaisons only.”

(Though since humans are allowed to lie in their feed profile, all it really tells you is how they’d like to be perceived.)

His body gives the impression of compact, coiled strength; his facial features are unremarkable, brows defaulting to an expression that makes him look perpetually irritated. There’s a faint roughness to his skin from long-ago acne scars—not generational wealth, this one—and a deeper gouge on one cheekbone, long since healed over. I catch this in sidelong glances, because the behavior protocol I’m in requires me to keep my eyes downcast—not that it matters, since he’s hardly spared so much as a glance at me. His focus is on Mareed, and I can tell that he’s trying to close the deal as fast as he can without drawing attention to his desire for haste.

I’m distantly aware when they agree on a sum of twelve thousand credits, and then download a basic template for a bill-of-sale from the feed.

At which point it suddenly becomes real that this is happening, that I’m about to change hands again in the swiftest turnaround of my life to date, to become the property of this hard-eyed, opportunistic grifter. I’m not sorry to see the last of Mareed, but I am aware that my new owner could quickly prove even worse—because there’s not a doubt in my mind that he’s far more tutored in inflicting pain than Mareed could ever be.

The rest of the transaction happens in a blur—they take the contract to the club’s banker to be notarized and to oversee the transfer of funds and transfer of ownership; my feed profile is updated to reflect my new owner’s name, and a hefty pile of hard-currency cards are stacked on the countertop for Mareed.

With the transaction concluded, my new owner stands. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he says humorlessly to Mareed, then turns away without waiting for an answer. He meets my eyes for the first time and tips his head toward the exit. “Let’s go.”

He’s doing an admirable job hiding it, keeping his face blank and his movements smooth, but his body is tight with tension, and he ushers me through the crowd with the alacrity of a man keen to remove himself from a crime scene. He pauses to exchange a brief word with the bouncer as we’re leaving, alerting the man that Mareed has the money to pay his debts, and Anara would be advised to collect it now, before he manages to piss it away again.

Then we’re stepping outside onto the busy thoroughfare that the Santorini Club sits on. TyMarraTen is a space station, but the entertainment district has been made up to mimic the look of a planetside metropolis—the various clubs, arcades, and gambling halls that line the street are dwarfed beneath a high glass dome, stars winking in the void beyond it. There are machines discreetly tucked under the awnings that emit a fine mist; it hangs in the air, casting a dreamlike haze over the scene, catching the colorful lights that flash from every sign and window, and settling cool and faintly damp on the skin, like stepping outside just after a rain.

It’s a fair approximation of the real thing, though I’m not sure why they went to all the effort, since every building on an actual planet is aggressively climate-controlled to keep humans from having to experience the outdoors.

My new owner doesn’t attempt conversation, just puts a hand on my back to keep us from getting separated in the evening pleasure crowd, a jostling press of humanity with very little spatial or situational awareness.

TyMarraTen has a pedestrian beltway that makes a leisurely circuit of the station—it’s not the fastest form of transportation, but it’s free, and scenic, and connects the shopping and entertainment districts to the convention center and the expensive downtown hotels. The beltway is what my new owner is aiming for, though trying to reach it is like swimming upstream—at this hour, there’s a flood of people coming off it to take advantage of TyMarraTen’s nightlife, and almost no one but us trying to leave yet.

We manage to get on the beltway and nab a pair of empty seats, and my new owner lets his hand drop. He hasn’t said anything since we left the Santorini Club, hasn’t even looked at me, though from his sidelong glances and stiff, closed-off facial expression, I can tell that I’m occupying almost all of his awareness. He isn’t a man taking home a new appliance; he is a man sitting uncomfortably close to a stranger.

“What’s your name,” he asks after a moment, sounding distracted and still not looking at me. His eyes have the telltale distance of a human doing something in the feed.

I’ve had a lot of different names, but what Mareed called me was definitely one of the stupidest, so I’m not going to volunteer that unprompted.

“Whatever you’d like it to be,” I tell him demurely.

He practically recoils. “No,” he says sharply. “We’re not playing that game. I don’t need the fawning, or the—the girlfriend experience.”

‘Girlfriend experience’ isn’t actually what any of my behavior protocols are called—that was just how a character on a popular serial once described ComfortUnits, and the term caught on among the general public. (The general public, of course, has often never interacted with a ComfortUnit before, so everything they think they know about us comes from media depictions of dubious accuracy.) Being told that my new owner doesn’t want ‘the girlfriend experience’ doesn’t help much with what he does want, but it certainly rules out the behavior protocol that Mareed had me running.

For lack of more specific parameters, I switch to UnitNeutral. It’s basically the “act like a low-level robot from crappy media” mode, but it’s the one behavior protocol I have that isn’t designed to be emotionally ingratiating. (Because it’s not intended for clients at all—it’s only supposed to be used for interacting with company technicians, since we aren’t meant to be seducing them.)

My new owner is pinching the bridge of his nose, looking deeply vexed, but trying not to take it out on me. I appreciate the effort.

“I need something to call you,” he says at last, his words clipped. “Take a minute to think it over, pick something you don’t hate. You can always change it later if you want to.” He pauses, then adds, “There is no wrong answer.”

Clients like to say things like that sometimes, and sometimes they even think they mean it, but what they actually mean is “you can choose anything from the set of options that I am imagining you might choose.” I can think of any number of possible names—from my 16-digit hard feed address, to embarrassing obscenities, to his name—that I can guarantee he wouldn’t find amusing or acceptable.

His eyes go distant for a bit as he does something in the feed, then about halfway through my allotted minute he says, “Run this. Send me the results,” just as a file pops up in my download queue.

It’s… an anti-malware diagnostic. My first reaction is indignation—is he so ignorant of constructs that he doesn’t realize the cubicle checks us for malware as part of its routine maintenance?—but that’s followed by the depressing acknowledgment that Mareed sold my cubicle eight weeks ago, so he might be right.

(To be honest, he should probably scan me for biological venereal diseases too. One of Mareed’s last-ditch efforts to keep his finances above water was to start making me available for short-term rental—which might have even worked, if he was better at managing his money. In practice, it was barely more than a bandaid on the problem, since he continued hemorrhaging hard currency at the clubs every night—to say nothing of how unpleasant it was for me, with all the stress and the risks that short-term clients bring. Constructs aren’t supposed to be able to harbor human germs, but… well. If a human I cared about were going to have sex with me right now, I would want them to use prophylactics.)

I dutifully run the malware scan, and when it reports back all clear, I feel myself breathe an internal sigh of relief. It wouldn’t have been any reflection on me if Mareed’s carelessness had gotten me infected, but my systems are the closest thing I have to something that is mine, and having their integrity confirmed makes my performance reliability tick up a full point. It’s up to 89% now, and the diagnostic shows that almost all of my biomarkers are within acceptable parameters, only my cortisol and norepinephrine levels getting flagged as elevated. (Which, given the past few months with Mareed, I could have predicted.)

I send the report to my new owner, and watch his eyes go distant while he scans it. A moment later he’s opening a private feed connection between us.

Interestingly, the connection also grants me access to his augments—I’m not sure if he meant for that to happen, but suddenly I have a new input, the view through his eyes, and the ability to pull diagnostics similar to the one he just requested from me. I ask it for a basic bioindicator panel (hah, turns out I’m not the only one with chronically elevated stress hormones), and then reconfigure my settings to start generating MHC peptides complementary to his—the olfactory compatibility that humans call sexual chemistry.

(When I look at the connection more closely, I realize it’s because his augments identified me as a medical-assistive device registered to him, and so automatically granted me priority permissions. I’ve never been owned by an augmented human before, so I didn’t know it was going to do that. I’m almost certain he didn’t know either—but I like being able to see what he’s doing, and monitor his biometrics, so I’m not going to bring his attention to it.)

He’s just opening his mouth to say something when a message pops up in his feed, Rent your ComfortUnit for 2 hours?

His optics snap to a formal-suited businessperson a few meters away, one of the many crowding onto the beltway as we pass through the corporate office sector, eyeing me with interest.

His scowl deepens. No, fuck off, he replies, and blocks the person before they can message him again.

The next thing I know, he’s in my feed profile, deleting the entry about my rental rates and replacing it with an unequivocal NOT FOR SALE OR RENT. Which is very heartening, actually, and makes my performance reliability tick up another two points.

“Have you picked a name?” he asks, and my attention snaps back to the question I was supposed to be pondering.

I have not. I belatedly run through a few thousand possibilities in 1.02 seconds, and obediently choose one I don’t hate. “Adeyemi.”

Instantly I regret it. I should have picked something else, something arbitrary that didn’t mean anything to me; I don’t want to have to tell him why that one. I’m already trying to come up with a bullshit non-answer that’ll satisfy the govmod, if he asks—but he doesn’t, just nods and updates my feed profile to reflect my new name.

(Well, he updates the nickname field, since constructs don’t have actual names. For security and liability reasons, our feed profile is required to display our owner’s name, and can only display the owner listed on our bill of sale. It’s to prevent obfuscation of legal responsibility for a construct’s actions, but the upshot is that corporates who are trying to front at being richer and more important than they are can’t swan around with a rental unit and pretend like they own it. For all that he got me at a steal, he does get to flaunt his name in my feed profile.)

“How do you wish to be addressed?” I ask. In UnitNeutral I’m not supposed to ask questions or initiate conversation, but the govmod considers this particular issue of protocol pressing enough to allow it.

He eyes me warily for a moment, then looks away. “Tarik,” he says at length. “My name is Tarik.”

That’s not any of the names in his feed profile—but again, humans get to lie about that if they want to.

And Tarik may still be an unknown quantity, but it’s a massive relief that he doesn’t seem interested in sharing me. Adapting to a new owner is stressful—being dispatched to service an endless stream of unknown humans with unknown propensities is a nightmare. I can still feel the visceral, claustrophobic dread that I got in my chest each time Mareed handed me over to a new short-term client, not knowing what they were going to do with me.

At the leasing agency there had been at least some security to keep customers from damaging the merchandise too badly; when Mareed rented me out for an evening, I didn’t have even that slim protection. And after he sold my cubicle, there would have been no fixing me if I were damaged—I’d gotten lucky so far, but if I’d been forced to keep rolling those dice, it would have been only a matter of time until my luck ran out.

That overture seems to have made Tarik realize how much attention my appearance is drawing. Through his optics I can see him eyeing me sidelong, looking at my body—or more specifically, looking at my clothes, if his points of focus are any indication. In the sheer mesh shirt and skintight pants that Mareed had dressed me in, with their flashy metallic colors, I look like every stereotype of the ornamental floozies that gamblers like to drape themselves with.

Tarik lets out a small sigh, then leans forward to shrug out of his jacket and thrust it at me. “Here. Put this on.”

Through his optics, I watch myself pull the jacket on and button it as high as it will go. It still plunges halfway down my chest, the expensive natural-fiber fabric at odds with the plasticky texture of my other clothes, but it does manage to tone down the look, taking it from “cheap sexbot” to “eclectic club-goer.” (Never mind that I’m pretty sure that’s the weight of a knife I’m feeling in the breast pocket.) Tarik seems satisfied with that, because the crease between his brows loosens slightly and he takes his eyes off me to watch the crowd again.

I can’t tell exactly what his augments do, but I suspect they’re some kind of combat-assist. His eye-tracking patterns are strange; his focus has a tendency to snap machine-fast to points of interest, linked to a small metric in the corner of his overlay that appears to be a threat-assessment module. If I’m reading those numbers right, its assessment of me is hovering in the high teens—which, unless he knows something I don’t, is an exceedingly generous estimate of how much of a threat I pose to him.

A part of me is also wondering if he could be induced to give me access to all his augments. His firewall is still blocking off the parts that interface directly with his neural system, but I would really like it if he’d let me in there. One, because tapping into his emotional metadata would make it infinitely easier to gauge his mood and tell what he wants from me, and two, because the sex when you’re riding someone’s neural augments is spectacular.

I’ve only had the opportunity to do it a handful of times in the past, because none of my other private owners were augmented, and making that kind of unprotected connection with a rental unit is an incredibly bad idea. (You want malware? Because that’s how you get malware.) But holy gods on high, it creates a feedback loop between the participants that will slam you with the most intense, prolonged, mind-blowing orgasms of your life; it’s no surprise that some people are willing to risk it.

Sadly, I don’t think Tarik is going to be one of them. He does not display the enthusiasm one might expect from a human who just acquired a new ComfortUnit, and there’s been zero sign of arousal or sexual interest when he looks at me.

Perhaps this was purely a financial opportunity to him—that he leapt at a good deal when it presented itself, and plans to immediately turn around and sell me on. Judging by how much I went for the last time I was up at auction, he’d be pocketing a good 60-70k in pure profit. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, for someone with the kind of wealth that his clothing suggests, but rich people don’t get rich by passing up opportunities to make even more money.

Well. Getting sold again puts me no better or worse off than I am now—it just prolongs the uncertainty.

*

We get off the beltway in front of one of the expensive downtown hotels, and Tarik steers me inside with another polite but impersonal hand on my back. He pauses briefly at the front desk to register me with GuestSystem, so that I’m authorized to come and go from his room, and so that he has recourse in case I get stolen.

We go up to one of the higher floors, where the VIP suites are. Tarik swipes his palm at one of the doors and then steps in ahead of me, bringing up the lights and pausing for a quick, cautious scan of the interior before he lets his guard down again, vigilance so ingrained it’s become second nature.

I follow him inside. The room is sleek and minimalist, with tastefully recessed lighting and a mirror across one full wall to enhance the impression of size and luxury. The furnishings are wood, with little embellishment beyond the rarity of the materials themselves, the same style of understated wealth as Tarik’s clothes.

(It’s a fashion trend that’s currently in vogue, so-called “masculine minimalism,” which glamorizes discipline, asceticism, and understated taste—I know this because Mareed tried it for a week, before remembering that he enjoys none of those things.)

Tarik’s presence rests so lightly on the room that at first glance it appears unoccupied. Then I see the traveling bag propped up neatly in one corner, a hotel robe tossed over the armchair, and an interface in standby mode resting in the center of the bare desk.

And a projectile weapon on the nightstand.

It’s matte black, haloed by the light of the bedside lamp, and shockingly out of place in this tranquil, elegant hotel room. I’ve never even seen one in real life before—SecUnits and human security personnel tend to be issued energy weapons instead, because they can be tuned to non-lethal power levels. Projectile weapons are for blowing holes in humans when you don’t care if they survive or not, and for putting down bots—or constructs.

Tarik turns to see why I stopped, and then follows my line of sight to the gun. It’s a small relief when he wordlessly crosses the room and puts it in the drawer instead. I don’t forget about it entirely, but the threat of it eases without its unsettling presence sitting there in plain sight.

He then ushers me toward the far end of the room, to a desk in the corner. It’s large enough for two people to work at in tandem, though only one of the chairs looks like it’s been used, the other still folded flat and hung on the wall. He takes down the second, sets it out and motions me toward it. “Sit,” he says, an order that’s delivered like an offer.

I sit.

He doesn’t join me immediately, but unlocks the room’s secure safe and retrieves a second interface that hasn’t been powered on yet. Then he takes the chair opposite me, and reaches up to the augments behind his ear and unspools a long, thin filament of a data cable that he plugs into the new interface.

The screen comes on, and I realize that it wasn’t powered down, it’s just completely cut off from the feed, so comprehensively that it has all the digital presence of a brick. Accessing it via physical cable instead of the feed ensures that none of the data can be skimmed or intercepted, and that it can’t be hacked or accessed remotely. His other interface is feed-enabled, with encryption that most corporates would consider plenty secure—this one is invisible.

And while I personally don’t care what cloak-and-dagger business the humans get up to with each other, the fact that Tarik has secrets worth this caliber of defenses—and a projectile weapon in the nightstand—makes it increasingly clear that whatever he’s involved in has the potential to be extremely dangerous, which makes being owned by him a dangerous proposition too.

I can’t see what he’s doing on the feed-disabled device (I’m designating that one BlackBox, and the other one OpenBox), but I can feel him active in there, can see the slight twitch of fingertips and vocal cords as he types, reads, types some more.

“What’s your manufacturer and model number?” he asks aloud, startling me after the silence.

I tell him; he enters that into a feed query, and then downloads my user manual into his workspace. He gives it a quick once-over, sees that it’s nearly two-thousand pages long, and puts it aside for later.

He does some more stuff on BlackBox that I can’t see, while I sit there in silence and try to concentrate on the texture of the wall, because there’s nothing else to think about that won’t drive up my stress hormones.

After a while I get a connection request from OpenBox. I accept, and find that he’s partitioned off an empty section of harddrive space and given me access and upload permissions.

“Okay,” Tarik says at last. He disconnects from BlackBox and lets the filament retract back behind his ear, then rotates his chair to face me. “I want all the data you’ve got on Mareed.”

Ah, so that’s what this is about. It wasn’t about Tarik getting himself a ComfortUnit at a steal—it’s about what’s on my drives.

I’m about to tell him that I can’t fulfill that request, because of the data interdiction that’s standard when transferring possession of a ComfortUnit to a new owner—

(Clients would like to guarantee the security of their data by wiping us entirely when we change owners, but the company hates to wipe our memory if they don’t have to, since we’re more effective when we’ve been trained on a large set of experiences. The compromise is data interdiction, which locks the information such that subsequent clients can’t access it, but we retain the memories as part of our training dataset.)

—and then I realize that my internal logs of Mareed are not actually interdicted. It’s baffling, since Tarik had downloaded a standard contract off the feed, and those stipulate data interdiction as a matter of course.

The document is still up in Tarik’s workspace, so I pull a copy of it—and sure enough, the numbering shows a missing subsection where the interdiction order presumably would have been. Tarik must have done some digital sleight of hand between downloading the contract and passing it to Mareed, and banked on Mareed being too stupid or too intoxicated to notice.

(In retrospect, this explains why he was subtly pressuring Mareed to close the deal quickly or lose it—he didn’t want to give him a chance to actually read the contract and possibly notice the excision.)

“Understood,” I say, by way of UnitNeutral. “Please advise the parameters of the desired data, and how it should be formatted.”

Tarik flicks a glance at me, like he was expecting a different response, then says briskly, “All of your archived logs, audio or visual or compressed summary data, from any time when he was running his mouth.”

The request for summary data is interesting—it means that Tarik understands how bot/construct memory is processed, how after a certain amount of time the oversized, over-detailed audio/visual/metadata logs are replaced with a highly compressed filetype that encodes all “relevant” data at a fraction of the size.

He continues, “Cut together a file in chronological order, make a text transcript with timestamps, and upload both to the drive. Don’t worry about processing for content, I’ve got dataminers who can handle that.”

I could handle that, if he’d asked, but he didn’t, so I don’t volunteer. It does rankle a bit to be treated like a sex toy instead of a machine-hybrid intelligence with orders of magnitude more processing power than he has—but it’s not worth getting zapped by the govmod to tell him so.

Then Tarik takes a deep breath. “But I also don’t think you should have to turn over however-many hours of footage of you being raped for strangers to pick through.” His voice is matter-of-fact, his eyes on me are steady. “Can you set a filter to exclude sexual content?”

“Affirmative,” I say, because that’s literally the least of what I can do.

Inside, I am bemused by the notion of calling it rape. A human might think of it that way, but the distinction is meaningless to constructs, when the entire reason for our existence is to be used however the client wants. It’s startling that he’s offering me privacy for the unpleasantness I experienced with Mareed—as if I were human and entitled to keep whatever dignity I had left.

(Or maybe he just doesn’t want to see it, and this is more about his comfort than mine.)

Tarik nods. “Good, then leave that part out. Does that cover everything you need to get started?”

“It does.”

“Alright. Have at it, then,” he says decisively and turns back to BlackBox.

I appreciate the clear dismissal, so I don’t have to keep hovering on the off-chance that he has further orders for me. And there are worse ways to spend an evening than doing large-volume data analysis, all 12,096 hours since Mareed took ownership of me. I can even partition the scan so it’s not involving my organics, which is good, because I don’t really want to relive every second I spent with him.

While I work, Tarik does too, composing something on BlackBox. I can’t see the output itself, but I can see his focus and the speed with which his lips and fingers are moving as he generates text. He spends twenty seven minutes on that, then taps it with finality and leans back in his chair, exhaling and folding his arms behind his head thoughtfully.

Through his optics I see his attention shift sidelong to me again, eyes drifting down my body with the neutral, assessing frown that’s practically his default.

There isn’t a shred of sexual interest in his gaze, no arousal quickening his pulse or respiration, and I find myself wondering if his feed profile had been lying about his sexuality too. Or perhaps it’s just me that he’s not interested in—there are some religious groups who think that having sex with machines is degrading to the human soul, or whatever.

Which might be a good thing. Dangerous humans often have dangerous appetites, and Tarik only being interested in me for my data lowers the odds that he’ll want to engage in recreational violence.

In fact I’m pretty sure he’s looking at my clothes again, not my body, which is confirmed a moment later when he reaches into the feed and pulls up the sleepwear catalog for a mid-range apparel store. He creates a new customer profile, uploads the measurements from my user manual, and then passes it to me.

Pick something for wearing around the room, he instructs me. Whatever you want, just keep it under a hundred credits. He pauses, then adds, This isn’t a test. There is no wrong choice.

I tap an acknowledgment, and open the catalog to examine it. Again, I don’t entirely believe him when he says there’s no wrong choice—in my experience, humans often don’t realize how rigid their sensibilities are until those sensibilities have been offended—but I can probably manage something he finds unobjectionable.

It is admittedly a novelty to be allowed even this much freedom, and I feel a rebellious thrill when I tell it to exclude clothing items tagged with “sexy.” Keywords that do pique my interest are “cozy” and “tactile,” as they tend to be accompanied by ad copy emphasizing comfort. That sounds nice, especially the warm and modest ones with long sleeves and long pants; if Tarik wants me in something sexier, then he can choose for himself next time instead of playing these games.

I pick a shirt-and-pants set that claims to be “luxuriantly soft,” in black because that’s a color Tarik favors, and then pass the catalog back to him. He looks at my choice without comment, adds a pack of unisex underwear and a few different pairs of socks, then orders all of it to be delivered to the room.

Then he drums his fingers on the desk, gaze distant as he looks out the window overlooking the station central, and it almost startles me when he speaks. “I’ve never worked with ComfortUnits before,” he informs me matter-of-factly. “I don’t know how you differ from other constructs.”

He might be telling the truth, or he might not—my behavioral analysis module gives it 55-45 odds. A lot of humans don’t like to admit to making use of ComfortUnits; they’re embarrassed by it, feel that it marks them as desperate somehow. Not embarrassed enough to stop, mind you, but embarrassed enough to lie about it.

“Is there anything specific you need for your upkeep?” he asks. “Tools, fluids, components… any maintenance procedures I’m supposed to do for you?” He scrunches up his face as he scours his memory, then offers, “Drones?”

Drones? Does he think I’m a SecUnit?

“A cubicle is required for home maintenance,” I say carefully. I’m bracing for his displeasure, because the expense of buying a cubicle is going to be more than what he paid for me, and that might come as an unwelcome surprise.

Tarik’s brows draw together. “Cubicles are like MedSystems for constructs, yeah?”

That isn’t their entire function, but I’m glad their existence isn’t news to him. “Correct,” I say, because it’s close enough. “They are necessary for repair and resupply, tissue regeneration, systems hygiene, software updates and maintenance, and diagnostic screenings.”

He absorbs that information. “How often do you need that?”

I’m unsure how to answer, until the govmod gives me an impatient zap for taking too long. “The unit should be returned to the cubicle whenever repairs are needed.”

We stare at each other for a long moment, then his eyes narrow. His voice is carefully level when he says, “Let me rephrase that: how often do you need the cubicle if I’m not hurting you?”

“Standard diagnostics and rejuvenation procedures are recommended at least once every ninety cycles,” I dutifully reply.

To my relief, he likes that answer. His frown lightens, and I can see the tension in his shoulders ease upon learning that he doesn’t have to address the cubicle situation right away.

And this does seem like cause for cautious optimism. He clearly hadn’t planned to come home this evening with a ComfortUnit, but he’s taking his responsibilities about my upkeep seriously, furnishing me with clothes and making sure I have what I need to function. I still don’t like the projectile weapon in the nightstand, or the implications of its presence there, but he doesn’t seem interested in turning his capacity for violence on me.

And I don’t know if it’s the hardwired desire to please my client, or calculated self-interest, or lingering pique, but something spurs me to volunteer, “The first pass of the footage will be done in 30.8 minutes. As this unit is equipped with modules for natural-language data analysis, it is also capable of applying filters to refine the output.”

The govmod doesn’t approve of me speaking out of turn, and makes its displeasure known, but when Tarik glances over at me, he looks intrigued rather than offended.

“You have a datamining module?” he says with mild surprise. Then, with a frown, “You weren’t always privately-owned?”

Because rental units almost universally double as spyware, logging every client interaction for resale by the leasing company, but people with their own personal sexbots don’t spy on themselves.

“Correct. Newly activated ComfortUnits are customarily dispatched to a short-term leasing agency for their initial acclimation period,” I say. “When purchased for private use, the module is deactivated, but not uninstalled.”

He considers that. “And you’ve got the processing power to do it?”

I’m not used to clients acknowledging the inorganic side of my nature so directly, and without discomfort; most humans I’ve met don’t know what’s going on beneath the hood with their ComfortUnits, and also actively don’t want to know. I can’t tell if Tarik understands constructs (the evidence is mounting that he might), or if he’s erring too far in the other direction and thinks I’m a bot. He seems to be treating me like the latter.

“ComfortUnits are not optimized for large-scale data analysis to the extent that a SecUnit would be, but for a limited dataset like this one, the operation could be completed in under six hours.”

Tarik makes a thoughtful little ‘huh’ noise. Then, “Yeah alright, let’s do it. Send me your provenance sheet and your system specs, along with a list of the modules you’ve got installed, and I’ll put together a query sheet.”

A query sheet provides the parameters for extracting specific information from a dataset—topics and keywords of interest, date range, etc. They’re fiddly and technical enough that executives and other managerial types tend not to have the ability to do it themselves (or do it badly if they try). If Tarik can actually handle it himself, then that’s a greater level of flexibility than I would expect from someone who calls himself a “broker.”

I obediently post the requested documents to our shared feed, and continue my initial pass of the data. Tarik gets up to retrieve a calorie bar and a water bottle from his luggage, then pulls up the documentation for my datamining module and settles in to start teaching himself the syntax for how to format a query sheet.

That’s interesting. He’d already revealed that he has his data analysis done off-site, but this suggests that it’s out-of-system as well—because if he were in easy contact with his dataminers, he would have just pinged them to send over their query sheet. This means there’s enough of a lag in communication that it’s more expedient for him to write it himself, rather than wait the hours or days for a message to travel through a wormhole and back, and also that he’s versatile and self-directed enough pick up new skills on the fly.

None of this is congruent with my experience with wealthy corporates. They don’t do things; they have other people to do things for them.

When Tarik finishes with the query sheet, he passes it to me in the feed and asks, Can you work with this?

I read it and then ping acknowledgment. It’s probably not as comprehensive as it would be if a proper analyst had written it, and it might not catch all the data he’s after (which means I now have the leeway to choose whether I do the job right, or whether I do exactly the job he requested and no more), but it’s tidy and structured correctly, which is not bad considering he only learned how to do this twenty minutes ago.

After finishing the query sheet, Tarik takes another break to shop around on the feed some more. This time he’s looking at the catalog of a tech store, browsing their hardware upgrades for ComfortUnits.

He taps me in the feed. Which would be more useful to you, faster processing or more working memory?

I consider that, then reply, Working memory.

Tarik taps an acknowledgment, and places an order for two memory chips compatible with my model. Then he pulls up my provenance sheet—my sales history, basically, the list of all my previous registered owners, with the dates of when I changed hands and how much I sold for each time—and starts tagging the names and copying them over to BlackBox. Opportunistically compiling a list of future blackmail targets, perhaps.

I consider whether there are any secrets belonging to former clients that I want to protect for them. Most of my private owners had their data interdicted before they sold me, but a few times it got overlooked—secrets that are now going to be ripe for the plucking if Tarik compels me to turn them over. It’s too late for Mareed, but for anyone else, I could keep their secrets safe, if I act fast. If I want to.

I decide that I don’t care about any of their business interests, and I don’t care about protecting the privacy of the dead, but I do excise approximately four hundred and forty-six hours of key footage from my fifth owner, data that doesn’t have any obvious monetary value, but was deeply personal and very painful to them. I move it out of my logs and into an undefined sector of my permanent storage, and then encrypt it for good measure. The odds are almost zero that Tarik, or anyone else, will give an order precise enough that would force me to turn it over in a readable format.

It’s close enough to disobedience to make me nervous, and I can’t keep from checking on Tarik in the feed, as if he might have somehow intuited what I just did. He hasn’t, of course; clients aren’t actually privy to every small act of rebellion. He’s absorbed in going through the list of my previous owners and running a feed query on each of them, and copying whatever he finds over to BlackBox.

“Your owner before Mareed,” Tarik says suddenly, and I have to suppress a startle. “It says here that he didn’t sell you. That you were repossessed by the company for ‘terms of service violations.’” Tarik looks up at me. “What’d he do?”

“This unit is unable to provide that information,” I let my buffer answer.

He frowns, tilts his head slightly. “Was it interdicted, or fully deleted?”

“Deleted,” I say.

“So you don’t know what happened, either.”

“Correct.”

Just the nebulous conviction that thinking about it too hard might trigger it to happen again, so I’ve always let my thoughts give it a wide berth—a mystery I don’t dare examine too closely.

Tarik tugs absently on his lower lip as he ponders that, then asks, “Have you had any other memory wipes?”

“There are no other sections of memory unaccounted for.”

“So you remember your entire eleven-year runtime?”

He must have looked at the date of when I was first activated, and done the math.

“Correct.”

“Huh.” Then, “Okay.”

And then he turns away and resumes typing on BlackBox.

*

I finish the first pass of the data, which takes it down to just over five thousand hours of footage, and prepare to run it again, this time with the query sheet. I inform Tarik of my progress, and he seems pleased. At this rate, I might finish before the memory upgrade even gets here, which would make it kind of pointless, unless this means he’s intending to keep me on for more data analysis in the future.

When my pajamas arrive, he sends me to the attached bathroom to change (an odd bit of body-modesty), and then invites me to take the reclining chair for the rest of the night. Curled up in a comfortable recliner, wearing my cozy new nightclothes, with fuzzy socks and a plush bathrobe that Tarik had requested from GuestServices, I am feeling exceedingly well-disposed toward him. I take the liberty of improving the parameters on his query sheet.

It’s not that I hate Mareed, or wish him ill, even though intellectually I know that perhaps I ought to—nor am I under any illusions that Tarik might not prove to be equally bad. But in the past three hours, one of them dragged me by my hair and called me a worthless whore, and one of them bought me fuzzy socks—it’s not hard to pick sides. I run the improved query sheet.

The results are… enlightening.

So, the timeline of my sixteen-and-a-half-month tenure with Mareed went something like this:

He hit a rare windfall at the tables at about the same time that he received a hefty bonus from EnBarraEnterprises, the corporation where he was a mid-level supervisor in charge of a few mining sites, and decided to congratulate himself on his successes by purchasing a ComfortUnit, i.e., me. (Or something like that—I don’t know exactly where the money for me came from, because it was before my time and also I don’t care.)

Unfortunately for Mareed—and by extension, unfortunately for me—his luck promptly went to shit after that.

First off, he had decided he belonged at the high-rollers tables now, which meant that when he started losing, he lost a lot, very fast.

Then to make matters worse, EnBarraEnterprises was bought out by a competitor, BreharWallHan, who immediately began carving up the company into the parts they wanted to keep and the excess that could be trimmed. Mareed’s cushy managerial job—which, let’s be clear, he had because of nepotism not any sort of talent or skill—was suddenly facing an extremely precarious future.

I was aware of this through Mareed’s many rants on the subject, which he usually directed at me since I was the only other human-shaped thing in the house. (Although he might as well have been complaining to the coffeemaker for all the response he expected.) I couldn’t muster up much sympathy for his corporate woes, since it’s not like he’d deserved his previous successes either—but the more stressed and angry and desperate he became, the more my situation in that house deteriorated.

Mareed had always been self-absorbed and temperamental, but now he was becoming dangerously volatile. The writing was on the wall that he would have to sell me soon—it was the only sensible thing to do—but common sense often took a backseat to his damnable ego. Sometimes, when he was in a dark mood (and especially if he’d been taking intoxicants), I was afraid his pride and possessiveness would lead him to kill me rather than endure the humiliation of letting someone else have me.

(Which is why Tarik, even with his murky intentions and the projectile weapon in the nightstand, was very nearly a godsend for showing up when he did.)

What I hadn’t been paying attention to, even though it had been happening right under my nose, was what Mareed had been doing while EnBarraEnterprises was falling to pieces: namely, that he’d been taking advantage of the chaos to redirect EnBarra assets and sell them off under the table to line his own pockets.

And Tarik—whoever he is, whoever he’s working for—was fully aware of that when he bought me. He already knew about Mareed’s extracurriculars; he knew what Mareed had done, he just needs my logs to pin down the who/where/when.

With Tarik’s query sheet telling me what to look for, I’m now realizing that Mareed made a fuckton of very incriminating comm calls right in front of me. I’m getting shipment dates, bank transfer authorizations, contact names, drop-off locations—an absolutely damning body of evidence that’s been sitting on my drives. If there was anyone left at EnBarra to protect their interests, Mareed would have been facing a firing squad.

It’s possible, I realize with some disquiet, that Tarik is the firing squad. I’ve no love lost for Mareed, but I’m not sure how I feel about providing the evidence that gets him killed.

Another possibility is that Tarik was sent by BreharWallHan to track down their missing assets—that’s congruent with the way he appears to be operating with a degree of autonomy, but can coordinate with logistical/analytical support elsewhere. Or he’s working for some third party that’s also sniffing around for unsecured assets.

Or maybe Tarik really is the free agent that he claims to be in his feed ID, a broker in the business of trading advantages. The data on my drives obviously gives him loads of blackmail material on Mareed—though that’s of limited value since there isn’t much more blood to be squeezed from that stone. With Mareed’s accounts all but empty, and his residence already leveraged as collateral on a bank loan, I’m pretty sure that Tarik bagged Mareed’s most valuable remaining asset when he got me. Maybe there are other reserves I’m unaware of—or maybe Tarik is after something other than money.

In any case, this backstabbing corporate clusterfuck is not my concern. Heads may roll, but not mine. Constructs aren’t players in these games, we’re spoils of war—and to the victors we go.

*

Shortly after midnight, the door chimes with the delivery of my memory chips. Tarik discreetly palms a shockstick from the drawer and slips it into his pocket before going to answer it, but it’s not needed. I hear him talking with a delivery bot as he scans his ID to accept the package, then the door closes and he comes back into the room.

He lobs the box to me underhand, and I catch it without difficulty. “Can you install those yourself, or will you need a hand?” he asks.

Uhm. “This unit is not equipped for self-upgrading,” I say awkwardly.

Tarik blinks. “It should be just plug-and-play. Shouldn’t even need a restart, since you’re not removing the old ones.”

“This unit does not have information on where to plug in memory cards.” For all I know, I’m supposed to swallow the damn things. At his continued bewilderment, I say pointedly, “Hardware maintenance is done by a company technician while the unit is offline.”

The govmod thinks my tone isn’t respectful enough and gives me a zap for that, but Tarik just looks mystified.

“But, it’s just—” He makes a gesture like popping open his chest. “It’ll be a panel somewhere on your inorganic components.”

He seems very certain of how this is supposed to work.

“This unit does not have visible inorganic components,” I explain slowly. There’s a dataport tucked into my navel, the same kind of connector as the cable to Tarik’s augments, but as far as I’m aware that’s my only external inorganic, and that’s not what he’s after. “By default, ComfortUnits are designed to look entirely human.”

This does not feel like it needs to be explained, but here we are.

Tarik frowns, then pulls up my user manual and searches for installation instructions; it tells him that upgrades and repairs can only be performed by licensed company service technicians.

He runs a feed query with my model number + “DIY install memory cards,” and gets flooded with videos showing a step-by-step demonstration of the process and listing all the tools needed, including half a dozen different types of proprietary screwdrivers.

It is, needless to say, not going to be as simple as popping open a panel on my chest, and not something he has the tools on hand to do.

This is where Mareed would have gotten angry, and likely not gentle about it, because he perceived every minor inconvenience as a personal insult from the universe itself. I realize I’m bracing for Tarik to turn the brunt of his ire on me—for being a ComfortUnit instead of a SecUnit or whatever he was expecting, for not having warned him that this wasn’t going to work, for wasting his time and money.

And Tarik does look vexed, but that’s how his face always looks, and all he does is scrub his forehead and mutter something sweary in a language I don’t have a module for.

Then he straightens, drawing in a breath and letting it back out. “Whatever, we’ll figure it out tomorrow,” he decides. “Are you still going to be able to finish running the query sheet tonight?”

I post the exact countdown to our shared feed—about three and a half more hours, if it keeps up at this rate.

He nods. “Alright. Then when you’re finished, encrypt it with this—” he passes me a key in the feed “—and upload it to the partition I made for you.”

He settles back down into his chair, his focus going distant for a moment, and then I get a notification that my permissions have been expanded. I now have read access to another drive on OpenBox, uninformatively called ‘E,’ filled with subfolders with names like Books, Educational, Games, Music, Serials, etc.

“I don’t have a lot of entertainment media, but you’re welcome to whatever’s on that drive,” he tells me. “Or you can browse the feed. However you want to occupy yourself while I’m asleep.”

That is interesting; only about half of my clients have understood that constructs don’t sleep (since all of my behavior protocols require me to mimic it when co-sleeping with a human), and exactly none of them have stopped to consider that eight+ hours every night of being allowed to do nothing but stare at the back of my eyelids is really fucking boring.

Tarik said he’s unfamiliar with ComfortUnits—and I believe him now, given that he expected me to be able to pop open a panel on my chest, which means he’s never seen one of us naked before—but I am increasingly certain that he’s had firsthand experience with other kinds of constructs. SecUnits or CombatUnits, most likely, given his affect and his combat-oriented augments.

“That is much appreciated,” I say politely.

He yawns. “And I can get you more media, if you like. If there’s anything in particular you want to watch, let me know.”

I have spent hundreds of hours seated next to clients while they watch media, and usually found it excruciatingly tedious. I think it’s because my microexpression and body language analysis modules are too good for the task, but I can see the actors acting, for lack of a better word—to my eye, they are clearly imitating the emotions rather than genuinely experiencing them. I am unable to suspend my disbelief, and so it doesn’t coalesce as a story to me, just people on a sound set walking between their marks and awkwardly reciting text.

(There are some, some actors who can manage it, and when that happens it is near-magical and I can briefly understand what humans get out of the experience. Dheeta Mandora, who plays the clan matriarch in The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and has won every award for it, is entrancing—but most actors are not Dheeta Mandora.)

Still, I choose to be touched that Tarik recognizes my need for enrichment, and is attempting to provide it.

He spends about ten more minutes composing something on BlackBox that I can’t see. Then without warning, I feel it connect to the feed for a fraction of a second—just long enough to fire off a transmission with a brief, highly compressed databurst. Then it’s gone before I can get any sort of read on its contents or destination, and BlackBox has vanished again as if it was never there.

And with that, Tarik seems to be done for the night. He decouples his augments and returns BlackBox to the hotel safe, then closes himself in the bathroom to do nightly human hygiene tasks.

I idly watch through his optics, since I don’t have anything better to do. He doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror, but I catch glimpses of his body while he gives himself a quick rinse in the shower—medium brown skin and dark body hair, more healed-over scars, and a typical set of male genitals.

Ten minutes later he emerges barefoot and freshly-scrubbed, hair tousled from the shower, wearing pajama pants similar to mine and a thin, sleeveless shirt that bares his arms and shoulders. They are, objectively, very aesthetically-pleasing arms, displayed to good effect as he perches on the desk chair to check OpenBox one last time, one knee drawn up to his chest.

He looks softer like this, drowsy from the late hour, without the armor of his ruinously expensive suit—a far cry from the hard, calculating man who’d taken ruthless advantage of Mareed’s misfortune.

A deceptive softness, if the gun still in the nightstand is any indication.

Finally he shuts off OpenBox and lays it on the desk, then politely says goodnight to me and climbs into bed. He turns out the lights, but it’s thirty five minutes of restless tossing beneath the covers before he finally stills and his breathing levels out into sleep.

Alone with my thoughts at last, I silently let out the breath I’ve been holding in. My performance reliability goes up six full points, as I’m finally able to drop the amount of processing power devoted to monitoring to Tarik from 34% to 2%. We never fully stop paying attention to our clients, but keeping an eye on his vitals is far less demanding than keeping constant vigilance over his every tiny twitch of facial expression and body language, to maintain an up-to-date, ever-evolving model of what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, what he wants, whether I ought to involve myself, trying to anticipate his desires and manage his moods.

New clients are always more stressful than familiar ones. When everything about them is still unknown and you haven’t yet established a baseline of their temperament and needs, your processors are engaged full-tilt with over-analyzing everything they do. If you’re lucky, this levels off pretty quickly—I’ve had clients who were so predictable and low-maintenance that I only needed to allocate 7% of my active processing to them even when they were awake and in the same room.

Mareed was not one of those clients. By the end, I was regularly spending upwards of 60% of my processing power keeping track of his mood swings, and doing what I could to anticipate and mitigate them.

It felt like burnout in the most literal sense—the strain of being constantly overclocked, only managing to keep my overworked circuits cool by running recharge cycles every chance I got. The cubicle, at least, had been able to flush my stress hormones, a reset of my organics that gave me some temporary relief. After Mareed sold it though, I’d been watching my stress metrics tick ever-higher with the feeling that I was hurtling straight toward some looming, catastrophic breakdown.

But I don’t belong to Mareed anymore. I know that on a factual level, though my organics have yet to catch up with my change in circumstances. They’re still primed for catastrophe, rattling with agitation and searching for threats that have yet to materialize. I wish I still had a cubicle—the fluid flush would have been desperately welcome right now, and would have helped me recalibrate to my new situation better—but instead I am stuck doing it the slow, organic way.

And even though it’s far too soon to draw conclusions about Tarik, I am having thoughts about him anyway.

The thing is, I’ve known a lot of humans who were living beyond their means—spending money they didn’t have on luxuries they couldn’t afford, in the hopes of convincing other humans that they were richer, more powerful, more important than they really were. I am one of those luxuries, and Mareed wasn’t my only client who really should have been spending his finite fortune on something other than me. And even when people like that are forced to economize, they still can’t keep from grasping at status symbols—fooling themselves as much as everyone else.

On the flip side, I’ve also seen how the truly outrageously rich live, the elites who possess wealth on a scale beyond what the common person can even comprehend. Elites who never even have to think about what something costs, because nothing is more than they can afford—they can buy anything they want to have, and buy people to enable anything they want to do.

Tarik doesn’t fit either of those profiles.

His clothes are eye-wateringly expensive handmade imports from beyond the Corporation Rim, and he’s staying at the most upscale hotel on the station—but when he shops the feed, he goes for mid-range retailers and sets me a budget. He has no entourage, no subordinates to whom he delegates tasks. He’s augmented for combat and keeps a projectile weapon in the nightstand. He does his own shopping and his own coding, has an interface so ridiculously secure that it might as well be a ghost, and sends his findings to someone else at the end of the day.

He’s too measured in his spending for someone genuinely wealthy, and all of his status symbols are outward-facing. Almost as if someone—say, the someone on the other end of BlackBox—outfitted him for the role and then dropped him here.

I don’t think Tarik is a corporate freelancer. I think he’s a corporate spy.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

On one hand, he seems uninterested in hurting me for personal gratification, which is a highly desirable attribute in a client. But on the other, I have no idea what he does plan to do with me, since he doesn’t seem to have any interest in the usual ComfortUnit functions. He’s making use of my datamining capabilities—upgrading them, even—but if that’s all he needs, then there are far cheaper and more efficient machines for the task.

Moreover, he’s a man who arms himself just to answer the door, and I’m afraid that once he understands the extent of what I can do, he’ll begin to think up some very, very dangerous uses to put me to.

And yet—he gave me fuzzy socks.

The last time I received that sort of small kindness from a client, something that was purely for my benefit and not theirs, a gift I actually wanted, was over fourteen thousand hours ago.

I know I shouldn’t read too much into it, shouldn’t get my hopes up. It’s pure foolishness, but I can never keep myself from hoping that this time I’m with someone who’ll treat me well. That maybe this time will be different, this time will be better.

*

I’m still running the analysis when at 02:03 in the morning, Tarik’s threat assessment module suddenly goes shooting off the charts, his heartrate spiking to 186 bpm and his breath running short and fast and labored.

It’s too early in his REM cycle for this to be a regular nightmare. And I know how to deal with sleep terrors, obviously, but usually I’m in bed with my client instead of halfway across the room—and worse, UnitNeutral doesn’t think I have any business getting involved. I’m torn between the obvious instinct to go help him, and the knowledge that I’ll get disciplined if I try.

I’m still debating what to do when he snaps out of it on his own, mercifully after only eight seconds. Through his optics, I see his eyes open to blackness, and then he bolts upright to scan the room, activating his augments’ low-light filter and taking in the ghostly shapes of the hotel room furnishings.

I close my eyes and freeze just before his focus lands on me, because his threat assessment module is snapping its teeth in search of a target, and I do not want to look like a threat to him in any way. It snaps to me, fluctuating between eighty and eighty-four percent for a few seconds, before it abruptly plunges back down to six percent and then stays there.

(I feel kind of bad, because I have a strong suspicion that this episode was triggered by his subconscious discomfort with my presence here, but it’s also not like I had any say in that.)

Tarik exhales hard, his shoulders slumping, and he scrubs a hand over his face. He checks the time in the feed, drinks some water from a bottle on the nightstand, then turns off his low-light filter and lies back down. He fumbles around under the covers a bit to kick off his sleep pants and toss them on the floor next to the bed, presumably for thermoregulation reasons, then resumes trying to sleep. This time it takes him twenty three minutes.

*

At 02:49 I finish collating the footage, and even though he didn’t ask for it, I also generate a report summarizing the results. I double-check the transcript to make sure the timestamps are linking correctly, and then even run a filter over the audio in a few places, to screen out obscuring background noise and boost the volume of Mareed’s conversation to make it easier to hear. A thank-you for the fuzzy socks, perhaps.

This isn’t my usual function, but I nonetheless feel the satisfaction of a job well done as I package up the file for encryption and post it to the drive. I don’t think Tarik will have any complaints with my work, and now I am free to investigate the drive of media.

I discover in short order that Tarik’s tastes are not mine.

He has a small collection of popular drama serials produced in the Corporation Rim (no interest—none of them have Dheeta Mandora), a modest collection of nonfiction books on the history and politics and economics of the Corporation Rim (no interest—there’s no point in constructs understanding how social systems work, since we have absolutely no power to affect them), and a large collection of educational videos put out by the Pan-System University of Mihira and New Tideland, aimed at a lay audience, about wormhole physics and deep space mapping and galactic radio imaging and other such excruciatingly boring topics (less than no interest—I’m programmed to care about humans, and there is a famously low density of humans in deep space).

(I grudgingly download the books, because text files take up a negligible amount of storage space, and it’s the kind of thing that rich clients occasionally want their ComfortUnits to be conversant in. Potentially a good thing to have, and makes me more attractive to future buyers, even if those topics are dead last on the list of things I’d read for my own entertainment.)

I do like his music though—some operatic-industrial stuff, plus a lot of looping, soothing instrumental tracks, and ethereal female vocals in that same language he swears in sometimes, the one I don’t have a translation module for.

I set a mix of it playing, and then isolate the lyrics and start comparing them against the languages in my translation database, looking for partial matches—I want to know where Tarik’s from.

I determine that it’s definitely in the Koinic language family, but when I query that in the feed, I’m informed that there are hundreds of Koinic languages spoken natively by over eighty billion people in the Aden cluster, and the Adenic diaspora has filtered across the entire Rim. So that really doesn’t tell me much about Tarik’s origins, beyond “somewhere in the Corporation Rim,” which I already knew, since he’s as unmistakably corporate-to-the-bone as I am. I keep exploring.

I find a cookbook from someplace called Preservation Alliance, which, according to another quick feed query, is a backwater freehold out in the middle of nowhere. I download a copy to my storage anyway, not because I care about their cuisine or expect to meet anyone who does (except apparently Tarik), but because I compulsively collect recipes and cooking techniques, and seventy-six of the seventy-nine recipes in it are new to me.

(On a practical level, expanding my skills database increases my value and makes me more likely to be bought for private use than sent to another short-term leasing agency or sold for scrap, but it also just seems to be an urge common to all constructs, to hoard every educational module we can get our hands on.)

Unfortunately, nothing on the drive tells me much about Tarik as a person, nor is there a convenient collection of pornography that would brief me on his sexual preferences. He is probably native to somewhere in the Aden cluster; he has connections to (or perhaps a hobbyist interest in) two different non-corporate polities; he listens to a lot of relaxing music (a good choice, for someone with his ambient stress levels), and prefers non-fiction to fiction.

I find myself circling back to the folder of games, which I’d ignored on my first pass. I’ve only ever played games with clients, which generally means I’m having to throttle my performance so that the client can win 80-100% of the time. Accordingly, my association with games is that they are both dull and slightly nerve-wracking, since it risks clients getting angry if they lose, or, paradoxically, getting angry if they realize I’m letting them win.

But I’m not playing with a client now.

(Tarik is awake again, but he’s trying very hard not to be, so I don’t have to acknowledge him.)

He doesn’t have a huge collection of games, and what he has are mostly tagged “strategy” and “resource management.” One of them is also tagged “cozy” though, which is intriguing—I have been having good luck with cozy things this evening, so I load it into my processing space and run it.

The game starts with a cinematic, a colony ship full of humans in suspended animation heading across the galaxy to the distant planet that will be their new home. But halfway there, something goes wrong, and the ship crash-lands onto a much less hospitable world.

The cinematic then pauses for me to customize the character I’ll be playing. I name it Adeyemi, since I cannot be fucked to come up with two new names for myself in one evening, and hit the randomize button for its appearance. I’m also prompted to choose my character’s career, with a helpful tooltip informing me that this will determine my starting abilities. I have no idea how any of my choices affect the gameplay, if at all, but “mechanical engineer” sounds like a useful skillset in this situation.

The game resumes, fading in from black, and my avatar blinks awake in a medbay to find a SecUnit looming over me. The animation is stylized enough that it’s not quite a jumpscare to abruptly find myself face-to-face with one of those opaque, unreadable, unmistakable faceplates, but it still gives my organics a sharp jolt of adrenaline that briefly sends my circulatory system into overdrive.

But it turns out that the SecUnit is on my side. It explains to me that the ship’s bot-pilot got corrupted somehow, and although it managed to turn what would have been a fatal crash into a controlled crash, we are nonetheless stranded on a hostile, uncharted world. Since the humans on board were meant to remain in cryostasis for the duration of the trip, the ship has extremely limited food, water, and other life-support resources. Only enough to wake one person, in fact—and the SecUnit chose me.

Thus, my job is to make the crash site more livable: repairing systems, building shelters, scouting for resources on this new planet, and implementing food production so I can wake more colonists from stasis.

The premise could have been horror in other hands (and I think I’ve watched media to that effect), but in this game there’s no pressure, nothing that can cause a failure state. I can take as long as I like to accomplish an objective, can bumble around doing things sub-optimally while I’m figuring out how to play, and there are no consequences other than it taking longer.

I find myself quite intrigued by the SecUnit. I’ve never seen a SecUnit in media that was both a character in its own right and an ally to the protagonist—usually they’re either an automaton, or evil, or both. Presumably there will be more people in the settlement later, once I start to wake the humans from stasis, but at this point in the game, the SecUnit is the only character for me to interact with.

I can’t decide if their portrayal of SecUnits is accurate or not.

Admittedly, I’ve never had much opportunity to interact with SecUnits directly—there were two at the short-term leasing agency (to keep rowdy clients in line; to keep clients from trying to steal us; to keep us properly cowed), and a couple of my owners rented them on occasion for high-security events. Still, I’ve observed them firsthand, and this one both is and is not like the SecUnits of my experience.

The game gets their armor and animation right—the standard SecUnit walk and attention and idle stances—but I’m not allowed to assign it any of the numerous tasks that need doing around the crash site. When I try, the SecUnit just tells me that it’s busy repairing the bot-pilot.

(Which is pure fiction—constructs aren’t allowed to refuse a direct order, no matter how good our reason might be.)

I am allowed to make conversation with the SecUnit through a number of limited, pre-scripted dialogue options. Attempting to engage with it on feelings or personal topics returns only buffer phrases (literally, I recognize some of them from my own queue) followed by a gameplay mechanic informing me that the SecUnit didn’t like that (-2).

(Probably because it just got zapped by its governor module, I think dryly, if the game were realistic enough for that. Still, the idea of triggering punishment—even on a purely fictional SecUnit—makes me uncomfortable, and I stop trying those options.)

The SecUnit is much more forthcoming on other topics, namely logistics and—surprise, surprise—security. It likes being asked about safety protocols (+2) and best practices (+2). It is happy to provide suggestions for my next steps to improve the crash site.

That part isn’t terribly realistic either, since the govmod wouldn’t have allowed it to be anywhere near as free with the unsolicited advice (it tends to regard that kind of behavior as cheeky), but it is a tidy mechanic for conveying information to the player, so I can suspend my disbelief.

The SecUnit also serves a tutorial function when my avatar ventures outside of the spaceship to begin scouting for planetary resources. It engages hostile fauna before they can attack me, and keeps them occupied while I figure out how to use my weapons; it warns me of planetary hazards, and can even help carry resources when I run out of inventory space, although it dislikes being made to do so (-3).

But it flatly refuses to accompany me further than a hundred meters from the ship, citing a need to remain close to the still-frozen colonists in case of emergency. Nor will it allow me to venture beyond that on my own, not until I pass my combat qualifications. (Which could have been waived if I had chosen a combat-trained background, but I hadn’t known that when I was making my character.) From a security perspective, that’s probably the right call, but it’s still cute that they think constructs are allowed to override clients’ shit-stupid orders.

The first time I lose a fight to hostile fauna is an unpleasant jolt—the screen fades to black, and I have a moment of panic that my character is dead, permanently, before it fades back in to show me in the MedBay, where apparently a drone managed to retrieve me. The SecUnit is also there (SecUnit disliked that (-5), the game informs me of my apparent death), and it passive-aggressively repeats its safety briefing on HostileFaunaThree, about how the fauna needs to be weakened with armor-piercing rounds before energy weapons will be effective. It’s kind of hilarious, actually, because it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d fantasize about being able to say to a client, if the governor module didn’t fry you for anything that sounds like an I-told-you-so.

I’m quite enjoying myself, and it gets even better when I discover that if I run multiple game instances, they can join each other in co-op mode. Suddenly I can operate several characters in the colony at once, greatly increasing my efficiency and engaging more of my attention. I can run five game instances before it starts to lag, and eight before it crashes altogether—and it occurs to me that if Tarik figures out how to upgrade my working memory, then I’ll be able to run even more. It’s an intriguing thought.

And I don’t know if I’ll ever be allowed the leeway to play it again in the future, but I save a copy of the game into my own storage just in case.