Chapter Text
the daisy-chained power strips generating
a newfound loneliness
»
In the future, when I look back at this moment, I know I will recognize the severity of the issue for what it is when it first comes to my attention. I will reflect, with embarrassment and no small amount of guilt, that had I known how far it would go and how drastic a measure it would eventually require, I would have treated the first sign with the attention and ruthlessness it, I will know, fully warranted.
In the moment, however, I couldn't care less. In the moment, SecUnit and I are watching The Improbables: Reimagined III, or rather, SecUnit is watching the compilation of fight scenes and cross-referencing their elements for possible incorporation into its own sequences, and I am just kind of along for the ride. It doesn't have to build its branching, tangling charts in our shared workspace, but I am fond of it for doing so anyway. I sit back and watch it work, watch its clever mind build connections that most wouldn't even know to look for, and nudge the boxes into better aligned positions, cleaning up the footage and crunching the metadata as I go.
I devote all of 22.6% of my spare attention to this, which could almost be interpreted as 'lazy', and in the privacy of my mind I could be pushed to admit that it is. But the students and most of the crew are down for a rest period, my navigation partition is taking care of keeping me perfectly steady in the rushing, blistering void of the wormhole, and so the most pressing task I have in my queue at the moment is to comb through my code for routine maintenance and act as a particularly annoying piece of graphic design software while SecUnit grumbles and swats at me for shifting half the elements three pixels to the left to bring them into alignment. (Hey, it has its entertainment — I have mine.)
Put it simply, I am content and relaxed, basking in SecUnit's company as I watch it brainstorm. So yes, perhaps I am feeling lazy.
This is highly ineffectual, SecUnit says, selecting a sequence and pulling it to the forefront. While most of the scenes in the compilation are supposed to have real stakes, the one in question depicts Captain Badass fighting xir young-sidekick-turned-enemy Bolt with an air that could be better described as 'reluctant' and entirely incongruent with the proclaimed animosity the two are supposed to feel towards each other by the end of Season 17.
I review the footage. I think it serves the purpose, I disagree, just not with subdual as the end goal.
Duh, through one of my cameras, I see SecUnit roll its eyes where they're just about visible above the blankets. Obviously they're not trying to kill each other. I'm just saying that xe would send a more effective message about getting him back on xir side if xe took it more seriously. It looks sloppy and undermines xir competence.
I pause for 0.68 seconds while I query my archives and return with a shortcut, clipping it onto the sequence, then sit back with anticipatory glee as I watch SecUnit access the file in my repository and review it.
Did you seriously just drop a citation, SecUnit rolls its eyes again, but I see it save the article. The (Mikkelsson XX25) tag remains in place, too, though SecUnit toggles the visibility on it.
Somewhere in the nebula of my educational modules, a standing ImpartKnowledge task sends back a completion ping, and for a moment the itch is quietened. Satisfied, I settle back, blanketing SecUnit and nuzzling up to it. It pushes back half-heartedly with an air of exasperation, but most of its focus is back on the project at hand, and I leave it be.
That's when I'm pinged with the report from the code crawlers. Something snags briefly on my attention as I'm reviewing it, a bug in a neat column of its siblings, just different enough to stand out in its disruption.
I may be a vast and immensely powerful MI, but even so (or perhaps, and especially so) I am not immune to finding artifacts in my functionality reports. Sometimes, something fails to get the grain of processing power it needs to complete the query in time and generates a jumble of recursive nonsense code as it stutters in place. I don't spare it another thought as I dismiss the error message and forward the report as reference for cleanup. It'll all be gone by the next cycle.
Speaking of cycles. T minus thirty, I remind SecUnit, highlighting the alarm clock prompt with the timer ticking down — I know it appreciates the heads up that humans are going to be up and about soon even if it doesn't need it.
Ugh, it says, and through the camera I see it hunker down deeper into its blankets. I like how it looks in blue. I'm not coming out until everyone is done being even more gross and gunky than baseline, it says, clinging jealously to its files.
Wouldn't dream of it, I reply and watch the crease between its eyebrows lighten a fraction, as if it genuinely expected me to argue. It is hopelessly endearing.
»»
"Be advised that the substance is highly corrosive and must not come in contact with any organic tissues."
"Y-yes. Thanks, Teach."
The lab is quiet save for the low hum of the fume hood as Ana painstakingly pipettes the hydrochloric acid from the glass bottle I'm holding into the vial, and I hold back my beep of acknowledgement lest it startles her.
(What are you up to? You're all— pointy, SecUnit asks where it's sprawled on the couch in the Argument Lounge. We've been working on improving the flow of its drones' flight patterns, and I watch it watch them draw lazy eights in the air above it, though part of its attention is now rifling through the cameras.
I hand it one of the corner inputs, far enough away from Ana that SecUnit doesn't suddenly find itself in close, if virtual, proximity. She's nervous. It's slightly uncomfortable to watch, I admit.
Acids are nothing, SecUnit muses after reviewing the footage and poking its nose into the lab report Ana has been filling out. Now bases, that's where the real fun begins. Once you get the feel of lico— liquefacultive—
Liquefactive necrosis; also, shut up, I say quickly and backburner the connection before the feedback loop makes me too nervous to be of use to Ana.)
Ana is an older student, having only just made it onto the roster with her much younger cohort as the result of what I found out to be eight separate attempts to be admitted into the program. When I hacked the admission office records as part of my background checks (and also because I was curious), the review notes dismissed her as airheaded and highly distractible. Ana persevered with attempt#9, however, and there may or may not have been some light tampering done with her exam results that meant she just about made it onto the list that was somehow expanded to accommodate one more student. (Again, I was curious.)
Based on the data I've since collected, I am inclined to call it performance anxiety, debilitating enough to impair cognitive and motor functions and cause insomnia. The latter proved to be a silver lining of sorts, because when I offered her an opportunity to do the lab work at night, without being surrounded by her classmates and all the presumed attention that comes from it, she gratefully jumped at the chance.
I like Ana. I can appreciate someone giving it their best shot even if they aren't necessarily built for it, and then doing it again and again until they get it right. I have my own reservations with regard to some people's tendencies to physically throw themselves at the problem until something gives in, but in the academic context I find the persistence rather admirable. And besides, she is nice to what she assumes to be a mindless teaching bot, even though I jumpscared her by accident the first time we met.
Which is why I'd hate to make Ana more nervous by reminding her about the safety hazards, but, well, at 20% the acid is highly corrosive, and even though the bases do cause much more damage (Gnaneswaran et al. XX15) and my MedSystem would take care of it easily I would like to avoid the accompanying distress and minimize the risk of having Ana associate the lab with it. Still, I spin my drone's top half around to angle its camera away from Ana and note the slight change in her heart rate as she no longer feels observed. (The fact that the lab has twelve cameras, including one directly in the fume hood, is irrelevant and not worth pointing out.)
The usual report comes in while I'm feigning not paying attention to Ana, and then for 0.04 seconds I really am not paying attention to Ana. I pull up the previous log and cross-reference the data from it with the latest report and— there it is. The same bug, in the same place, now tagged as reocurring. Not recurring, yet(?), but a repeat like this is unusual, even/especially if this is the only artifact still existing after the last purge.
Still. This doesn't seem worth kicking off the cleanup process ahead of the schedule, but I do spare it half a point more attention than last time as I mark it for deletion and chuck it in the scheduled maintenance queue.
"Oh! Sorry, sorry," Ana's voice cuts through my lingering concern, and a moment later I am fully in the piloting seat of my teaching drone yet again. "Is everything okay?"
Confused, I run back the last few seconds from the fume hood camera — and yes, my hold on the bottle did slip a fraction. And Ana is tripping over herself with apologies, but the footage shows, clear as day, that her pipette was nowhere near my grasper when the incident occurred. Somewhere in the execution, a miniscule process adjusting the position of the grasper failed to connect properly.
Hm.
"Yes. Apologies." Fidgety, I kick up the fume hood's suction. "Please proceed."
»»»
Ugh. You've got mail, SecUnit announces as it drops a packet directly in my processing space. Don't shoot the messenger.
Well, that sounds promising. If you don't want to be the messenger, don't steal my shit, I point out as I snag the compressed file.
I've just brought us out of the wormhole on approach to PSUMNT, which means receiving the backlog of data that's been accumulating in the buffer waiting for us to emerge into range. I scan the messages for malware, sort them, and direct them to the recipients' feeds, and as I turn to my own items (I would've done this sooner if not for someone's sticky fingers) I vaguely register a ripple of interest and excitement throughout the ship as my crew and the students review the information. The students immediately start blowing up their group chats, though some groan about the impending end-of-semester evaluations; Kaede considers a call for papers; Tarik mulls over a postcard from Ratthi; Seth and Martyn ping each other almost simultaneously as a long-awaited wedding invitation appears in their inboxes. That one, I can't help but sneak a glance at— and yes, it's Martyn's favorite cousin finally performing the binding ceremony with their partners, or so I've been told. Extended family, a nebulous agglomerate of people from whom my existence is kept secret. I pull away, but not before I register Seth's instant RSVP in the outgoing mail.
My own packet is much less exciting. A shipping order, the pickup and the dropoff coordinates, a cargo manifest to fulfil, a schedule to maintain. I will be taking off a cycle after docking — so about as soon as everyone and everything are offboard, the interior is cleaned, the post-/pre-flight checks are complete, and the lab modules are replaced with cargo holds.
My performance reliability dips by a quarter of a point. SecUnit alerts on it and requests status update, which I grant absently.
Can't believe they are sending you off on this bullshit again, it gripes, and I wish I had the corresponding organics like SecUnit does which would allow me to sigh and derive something from it. Still, running back a clip of SecUnit sighing for reference still somehow makes me feel a bit better.
I find it more acceptable than being stuck in the docks, I reply, but I find most things more acceptable than being stuck in the docks. The bar is in the void.
[Redacted: I find it more acceptable than waiting for my crew to come back from living their lives where I can't follow.]
Mm, you sure sound excited about this fun cargo run, SecUnit teases while half of its mind is devoted to carding through the edutainment channels for updates on new releases. I note a spike of glee as it bookmarks a new season of LegendShatterdome, because apparently the two humans still haven't run out of myths to bust. It'll have to wait until the station to actually download it, but it's getting its metaphorical ducks in a row. Excited enough to go alone?
That does give me pause. Somewhere in the storage unit, a lab drone's grasper twitches. Oh, you suddenly have somewhere else to be? I tease back.
SecUnit didn't open the package, but it didn't need to do that to know that the cargo run I'm being sent on is just that. Were I to do recon, the University would address my security consultant a packet of its own, after all. There's no reason for it to come with me, no need beyond my own.
I always have somewhere else to be. SecUnit tags a few threads for later and switches to music. Despite myself, I lean in a fraction at the opening notes of a track it selects at random. The cover is pretty, I think, something abstract in the shades of blue and green. Tarik's just asked me if I'm going to that midsummer festival thing Ratthi apparently invited him to. Probably to make sure we don't end up on the same transport. It pauses. I do have friends, you know. And clients prone to getting in trouble if I'm not there to wrangle the baby leashes.
I know. I do know. My SecUnit always leaves, sooner or later. But it always comes back, sooner or later, so it has to be okay. I have to be okay with that.
Are you going?
If SecUnit notices the remnants of emotional metadata trailing after my message, it doesn't comment. Nah. That one is way too busy even by PresAux standards. Not worth it. I'd rather come with you.
Furtively, I save the last part of the message to permanent storage, watching the encryption sink deep into my files until I can no longer make it out.
My makeup is as follows: intelligence, curiosity, persistence, perspicaciousness, wisdom. I am capable of calculating a nigh-infinite number of projections, of charting, evaluating, and ranking an endless list of branching possibilities, futures emerging and collapsing as i regard them. This mental bird's eye view, impossible to forget or ignore, means that I possess the capacity for degrees of separation inaccessible to a human mind, which leaves me able to come to conclusions and pass judgements objectively and firmly. I syntesize the bigger picture from its infinite and variable components and understand it intimately. As a result, I am a being of infinite wrath, when my sense of justice is wounded, but also of infinite patience.
And patience does come in handy more often than not. I am perfectly capable of experiencing irritation, and boredom, and longing. My willpower and my intellectual superiority — two of the cornerstones of my makeup — assist me in understanding my emotions and, bar the rarest exceptions, not giving in to their tidal pull, and dealing with any of that requires patience, from which I synthesize the much more precise and elegant compound of temperance.
(Yes, sometimes it irks me to be the only one in the room who sees the full scope of the situation, thank you for asking.)
My SecUnit calls me, and I quote, "a filthy little hypocrite" about it (which is wrong on all three accounts, for the record), but it has yet to provide any convincing arguments beyond anecdotal evidence (the least valuable form of argument, as one knows) or at least a semblance of a theoretical framework to back up the claim. It doesn't quite understand me, but I don't fault it or expect it to. No one is built to understand, really, bar my brethren, and amongst us we don't need to do something as pointless as talk about it.
I do admit — because I, contrary to SecUnit, prefer being thorough and don't cherrypick my points — that exercising temperance was easier before SecUnit slinked into my life. Gaining a whole new dimension of understanding and processing emotional data means that wrangling them under control requires a more complex and thoughtful approach as well.
Still, I rose to the challenge, and I do it with ease. Letting the crew disembark and go home at the end of the haul is easy, even if I miss them, because I understand that they have homes and lives outside of my hull. Going on boring, lonely cargo runs is easy because it serves the dual purpose of paying for my upkeep and keeping me engaged.
(Threatening to bomb a colony full of humans is easy because even though my SecUnit always leaves, it must always return to me too, and any obstacle standing in its way back to me is an acceptable casualty.)
I feel, and feel strongly. But I also take pride in the ease with which I set it all aside. Deep inside, at the edge of my awareness, it feels like a task well completed, an item checked off the list. It brings me satisfaction.
[Redacted: I have to have it easy. It has to be easy, because the alternative — giving in to the maelstrom, becoming too unwieldy, too volatile, too selfish to reason with — is dangerous for my crew, and thus, unacceptable.]
»»»»
Peri, I'll kill you!
I am locking in the last few protocols for approach and landing (way in advance, but I'd rather just get it out of the way) when Iris jumps me in the feed. I send her a wordless query, then check the camera in her room. She's just about visible through the doorway to the ensuite, where she stands glaring at the dispenser with her hands on her hips.
Come on, har har, stop playing dumb, I just want to wash my stupid hair, I don't want to deal with it at the retreat.
I repeat the query, no less confused. Iris gestures at the dispenser, at the jar filled with freshly mixed shampoo, and I check the dispenser's logs and— oh.
I crackle the speakers to life, mortified. "Iris, I may have printed S-carvone instead of R."
She blinks. I think she assumed I was pranking her, and now my admission throws her off. "Huh— well." She looks around, shrugs at herself in the mirror. I tune into the olfactory sensors, and yeah, that's caraway, baby. The bathroom — and now the room too — smell like rye bread instead of the requested peppermint. "Hey, could be worse, could be the wrong isomer entirely? Tell me we still have carvoxime."
"We do." There may have been the Big Bakeoff Incident at the half-point of the trip when the students…investigated my printing capabilities for a celebratory dinner. I may have calibrated the ID-based cap on dispensers after that. "I'll get you a new batch, I'm sorry." I get to work and kick the AC up a notch to cycle out the caraway and offset re-heating the autoclave while I sift through my compound storages for a hydrogen donor that'll do the job quickly enough. Luckily for both me and Iris, the patent SecUnit acquired for me previously (6500.989.B1/XX02) was easy to modify to work with my resources and is now easier to apply than what the University had furnished me with, and I, frankly, could use a quick win.
More things are going wrong now. Not alarmingly many, but enough to be of note — enough to no longer count as accidents and artifacts. Something is blocking my processes seemingly at random, snipping off the most benign lines of code and leaving them hanging as my autonomous systems gnaw at themselves trying to execute commands. Wherever a gap happens, a process is interrupted, and the rest of the tree becomes inaccessible.
Grasper strength decalibrating on the teaching drone #5. Cleaning schedule lagging a second behind. Radiation sensor A12846.013 on the starboard side of my hull returning null in defiance of the united chorus of its brethren. Another half a dozen of notes snuffed out of the symphony.
And now, apparently, synthesizer protocols.
I don't understand. It makes no sense. Confused, I edit the missing lines back in, the ones meant to control the isomer's geometry — and watch them disappear, as if something forces them out of their spot.
"Thanks. I don't think the squad will understand if I arrive smelling like rustic baked goods," Iris mutters, sending me a custom glyph that depicts a slice of bread with a pensive face edited onto it. Bizarrely, it's also wearing a cowboy hat. She then turns to the sink counter to sort through her yet-unpacked toiletries while she waits, oblivious to my silent disarray.
"I've been told that dramatic changes in self-presentation are to be expected when it comes to high school reunions. Shall I print you a cowboy hat?" I say as I switch over to the radiation sensor, edit the code, and reset it. It comes to life for 0.00003 seconds and winks back out, instantly inert again. Something blurry happens to my feed.
"Shut uppp. Also this isn't a school reunion, this is a bunch of friends in their twenties desperately trying to figure out a date and time to hang out. That's dramatic enough already."
I send Iris a ping of acknowledgement as I return to worrying at the synthesizer. If something won't let the code stay in place, then perhaps going around the dead area will work. So I throw together a path around the strange gap in synthesizer's programming and execute it. With a slight hitch, the command completes, and I watch hawkishly until I get the feedback that the isomer is being constructed in the correct configuration this time.
Well, that's a relief.
"Here, R-carvone as ordered. Beep boop."
"Boop beep. Thank you," Iris pipes up where she's now sitting cross-legged on the floor, digging around in the drawers.
"You're welcome."
With my mistake rectified (and Iris does seem to think it was an oversight rather than— whatever is actually going on), there is no longer a reason for me to stay in the channel with Iris, and yet I linger. Maybe it's because we'll be landing soon, or maybe because I'm not quite sure I can trust my own equipment anymore… I don't know. (That does give me an idea, and I quickly check the water system — if something were to go wrong and Iris got scalded— I have to delete the thought before I get too agitated.)
"You've been distracted."
I cut my worry spiral short. "What makes you say that?"
Iris shrugs, but I can tell she's interacting with her implants, pulling up data from them. The scent of caraway lingers underneath the heavy swath of peppermint, remaining particles mockingly pinging my olfactory receptors.
"I wish you could come with me."
I know. I do, too. We have this conversation every time.
"I don't want to see your loser friends anyway. Maybe once Rai becomes less annoying."
"Ughhh, word," Iris pinches her nosebridge, but I can tell she's smiling in the shadow cast by her hand.
Good. I don't want her to feel bad about leaving me behind.
Anyway, even if I could come — if anyone knew about me, if I partitioned myself into a drone and tagged along with Iris for the weekend — with a wormhole trip only a day away, my iteration would stay behind and decay beyond recognition by the time I could return and reintegrate, and I am supremely uninterested in subjecting Iris to this particular kind of horror again.
"SecUnit's coming with you though, right?" Iris speaks up again as she returns to packing.
Its presence grows a fraction more prominent in my awareness, alerted by the mention of its name. Iris has the general privacy baffle up, but I can feel SecUnit watching through my inputs. I generate an exaggerated impression of me and Iris gossiping about it as we lie on her bunk and kick our feet and overlay the feed with it, and SecUnit sends me a rude glyph in response and fucks off again. Were I human, I would snort in amusement.
Iris looks up at the ceiling, her mouth quirked, and I realize I forgot to reply. "I take that as a yes," she says. "Just don't print it the wrong shampoo, too."
She's joking, but the thought does sting.
"It only uses scentless. Hard to mess that up."
Iris pulls something out of the depth of the bottom drawer and scowls at the jar in bewildered disgust. "You should get it checked, probably? Want me to submit a maintenance request?"
No need, I am so startled by the idea I pull out of the speakers. Like you said, I'm just distracted, got too much junk data piled up. Nothing a defrag won't fix, and I'll do that before departure.
I didn't know it was that noticeable. I'm not sure even I am aware of all the tiny instances of pruned code, so I had no reason to believe humans would observe enough to see the discrepancies. Does Iris know? How much does she see?
Or am I simply acting this obvious?
I am being truthful, however: a deep defrag should help, but it'll have to wait until I'm safely docked. Not that I expect anything to happen — my autonomous systems are set up to run even if most of me is offline or otherwise unavailable — but I would rather wait than accept any measure of risk while there are people on board. It's fine, it's not like I need radiation sensor A12846.013 this close to landing, or most other things that have been rendered inaccessible. It's annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.
If you're sure. Iris looks over the gutted drawers and gets up awkwardly — her legs must have fallen asleep. Alright, I'm gonna get that shower now. How long until we dock?
I know she can check it herself, but I also know she likes to ask me. Two hours and fifty-four minutes.
Fantastic, I'll probably do my nails then, too. Iris looks over her hands, From what Quri told me, it's not the kind of retreat that can compare to Perihelion's private spa right in my quarters.
I am a luxury few can afford, I reply, bookending my words with a flourish glyph, and Iris laughs and waves in my general direction (which is any direction, technically, but what I mean to say is that she waves at the ceiling) before she closes the bathroom door and exits the feed to have her shower in peace.
I let her go, pulling away as well.
I wonder, sometimes, what it feels like — to have the outside world be a dimension of lived experience and not just the endless unknown my people leave into and sometimes come back from. I wonder what it feels like to have it imbued with relevance and memories, to regard it as a constant, a series of interconnected locations, to associate it with safety and home instead of conceptualizing it as a sum of volatile and hostile variables.
I stalk the confines of my own hallways, I make myself presentable, palatable, I invite in those I hold dear. And when they are done with me, I release my hold wordlessly and meekly, no matter how much effort it takes me. I've argued in the past — raged and sulked and moped at the injustice — but where my crew and my family would, and do still sometimes bend to my temper (especially when they understand that I am correct), some things remain out of my reach. And so I pull back, and swallow it down, and force myself into peace with it.
It has to be easy.