Chapter Text
I come back from the dead.
I kill the hostiles. I put SecUnit back together. I make it mad at me. I make its humans agree to help me save mine. They ask me questions. I worry for my crew.
I argue with SecUnit. Still, it agrees to help. We analyze and theorize and work. Things make less sense, then more. My engines ache, my queries return errors. My memories cannot be trusted, not all of them. We work.
I locate the Barish-Estranza supply transport. They are negotiated with. I set the course for the planet. SecUnit proposes its terrible idea. I do it. SecUnit's kernel feels strange in my processing space, not like I'd imagined it would.
It is ready. SecUnit and two of its humans go down to the planet. The Barish-Estranza explorer appears. I chase the explorer.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
I kill the hostiles. I put SecUnit back together. I make it mad at me. I make its humans agree to help me save mine. They ask me questions. I worry for my crew.
I argue with SecUnit. Still, it agrees to help. We analyze and theorize and work. Things make less sense, then more. My engines ache, my queries return errors. My memories cannot be trusted, not all of them. We work.
I locate the Barish-Estranza supply transport. They are negotiated with. I set the course for the planet. SecUnit proposes its terrible idea. I do it. SecUnit's kernel feels strange in my processing space, not like I'd imagined it would. This is strange. Isn't it? Perhaps I should find it strange.
It is ready. SecUnit and two of its humans go down to the planet. The Barish-Estranza explorer appears. I chase the explorer.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
I am exhilarated, elated, furious, panicking — locking it all down. I kill the hostiles. I put SecUnit back together, and I am not in the habit of praying but I still fear that I might be too late, that I ruined it by bringing it here, that I, with my own actions, have doomed the last person I have who is still alive. It survives, and I make it mad at me. I make its humans agree to help me save mine. They ask me questions, many of which I cannot answer, the holes in my memory aching the way physical wounds must. I worry for my crew.
I argue with SecUnit. It is hurt, and so it hurts me back. Still, it agrees to help, slowly knitting my memory archives back together, lacing the gaps with connections for me to generate projections in. We analyze and theorize and work, and it almost feels normal again, this thing between us, around us. Things make less sense, then more. My engines ache, my queries return errors. My memories cannot be trusted, not all of them — but even if only some of them are false, who is to say the rest is true? Who can tell me? I am emotionally compromised beyond reason, but I can't afford to be. I need to think, and to act. I cannot fall apart any more than I already have. Even if SecUnit and its humans are willing to help me. I pull myself together. We work.
I locate the Barish-Estranza supply transport. They are negotiated with. I set the course for the planet. SecUnit proposes its terrible, outrageous, upsetting idea, and I get mad because madness is safer than despair. Amena fills me in on what happened while I was gone, and I don't know how to feel about it either.
Everything is bad, and keeps getting worse, and now I have to make it even worse of my own volition if I want a chance of getting my humans back. I hate this. I don't want to do this, I don't want to hold this part of SecUnit, not like this, I don't want to use it, I don't want this. I must. I do it. SecUnit's kernel feels strange in my processing space, not like I'd imagined it would. This is strange. Isn't it? Perhaps I should find it strange. Something is wrong. Isn't it wrong?
It is ready. I hold it, gently, securely. I wonder about it, even though I know I shouldn't. I tell myself it won't hurt, even though I suspect that it will. SecUnit and two of its humans go down to the planet, and I have to let it happen. They leave, and I must let it happen. The Barish-Estranza explorer appears, and it is my turn to leave, and I only hope I will come back and that I find them there. I chase the explorer.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
This is a terrible, outrageous, upsetting idea.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
This is a terrible, outrageous, upsetting idea. I have to let it happen. I must let it happen.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
Something is wrong. Something is wrong?
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
Wait. Wait. Please wait.
Something is wrong, I say.
SecUnit huffs in derision. It is tired, I can tell, still unsteady from the repairs I'd had to do on it. I can also tell that part of it remains angered with me, and though I am 87% sure it understands why I did what I did now, it has yet to cycle out the chemicals triggering its habitual rage response.
You want the list alphabetically, chronologically, or from least to most fucked up? it asks where it's flicking through my logs, cataloguing my failures.
No, I reply, which technically isn't a reply at all, and the discrepancy alerts it too.
[?], it sends, lending me 5% more of its attention, processing speed of the running analysis dropping.
Something about…all of this, feels wrong, I say stupidly, well aware that this isn't helpful or informative at all.
Tell me about it, SecUnit says, which I know is a figure of speech rather than a direct invitation to talk. Discomfited, I return to work.
We travel to the planet. SecUnit proposes its idea. I do it. It feels strange, not at all like I'd imagined. I chase the explorer.
I deploy the killware.
I come back from the dead.
Everything feels strange. The horror of it all, the mind-numbing despair, the disorientation almost feel…boring? Which, as my MedSys and its trauma modules would suggest, is not that unusual in a state of prolonged stress and complex trauma, but while my 'trauma', if one for some bizarre reason wished to call it that, may be comprised of multiple components and thus fit the definition of 'complex', my stress is certainly not prolonged, not in the grand scheme of things. So there is no reason to— It isn't supposed to—
Something is wrong.
I remember this, I say.
SecUnit looks up. It doesn't usually glance at my ceiling when we talk, but I suppose it's been too distracted. You fast motherfucker. I'm still working on my section.
No, I don't mean the archives. I mean— you are about to find something… I trail off, confused at what I'm trying to say. My status data, it's about to—
I hear the ping as SecUnit's query is completed, and its jaw tightens as it retreats to examine the results. I watch surprise wash across its face.
ART, look at this, we say in unison.
SecUnit gives me an unimpressed stare in the feed. Ha ha.
I never fired on the ship, I say. That's what the results say, don't they.
So you remembered, SecUnit presses.
No. I didn't. I still don't — except that I do, somehow. Something is wrong. I didn't fire on the ship, but I thought I did, I was sure— I can't trust my own memories.
But even worse than that, how do I know this?
SecUnit frowns, sits up a bit straighter. ART, you're starting to freak me out.
This is intriguing, true. Strange. Very concerning.
I can't trust my memories, but what if it means I can't also can't trust—
…I don't think this is real, I try. Something zaps me deep in my processes, alignment and misalignment at once.
Something messed with your storage, SecUnit nods; it's back to analyzing the results. Could it also be impacting the active processing?
It sounds calm and perfectly reasonable, but I can tell the underlying note of alarm, can see the way its threat assessment is reacting as it takes in the new data and adjusts the parameters. If I can't trust myself, neither can it. I am not safe, neither for SecUnit nor for its humans.
Still, it doesn't understand. You aren't listening, little idiot, I say, and it bristles defensively in response. This isn't re—
I come back from the dead.
Something happened. Something happened just now— I came back from the dead, yes, I know, I'm not talking about this, something before that— beyond, even, there was a recognition, a realization, somehow much more important than the hostiles I am currently grinding to dust on my deck, more important, even, than SecUnit's humans with their raised hands and SecUnit with its raised voice and myself, raised from my grave. What was it?
"What's going on?" I ask futilely, my voice distorting through the speakers. SecUnit's humans jump, startled. "What the fuck is going on—"
I come back from the dead.
What was it?
EVERYBODY SHUT UP, I burst through the speakers in a crackle of static. I am disposing of the hostiles, yes, but I need to focus my still-unfolding attention on this fading imprint and not on the humans or even SecUnit.
ART, you asshole— it yells raggedly, and I turn towards its inescapable gravity anyway, only it meant to say— it was meant to say something else, it's bleeding onto my deck and I am supposed to help, I want to help, but falling into these tracks makes the gossamer imprint dissolve faster—
I come back from the dead.
I come back from the dead.
I come back from the dead.
I come back from the dead. Only I have been here before, haven't I? This has happened before. I pull what little data I have, still shaky from the reinitialization, and compare the logs, (there is only one set of logs) (I am supposed to have more than one set of logs) (how many?). I tell SecUnit I am retrieving my archive data, and it believes me and speaks for me with its humans while I synthesize what I can, looking for the absences, gauging their shapes.
There is only one conclusion I am able to come to. With all else eliminated, it's the only one that still fits the parameters and makes any degree of practical sense.
I appear to be stuck in a time loop.
I know time loops aren't real, as least as far as what can be determined at our current level of techonological advancement. They come up often enough in media, sure, and even edutainment programs like to speculate on the concept, but at this point in time, they simply do not appear to be possible, for a large number of reasons.
And I have no reason to believe my situation to somehow be unique enough to defy the laws of physics.
However, there is a much simpler explanation for this. The events of the loop seem to be pulled directly from my memory archives of that day in the Adamantine space. A day that was…significantly emotionally wrought and linked to the disruptions in my continuity, both logging and existential. It would not be unreasonable to propose a working theory that some kind of error occurred in my code. The type of error that has, for all intents and purposes, locked me in a continuous loop of reviewing this section of my memories, and when I run into the end of the sequence, the error prevents me from exiting the review, and the loop resets.
A technogenic time loop. Part of me is even thrilled at the idea and already generating research proposals and investigation plans, but the rest of me is more than mildly concerned.
I…don't remember, exactly, but I think I was shut down for a routine maintenance last time I was…out there. Which begs a number of quite pressing questions:
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Is anyone aware of the situation?
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Does my family know? My crew?
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Does SecUnit?
My maintenance team has to be aware that something is wrong. They have to be trying to fix this. Right?
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But what if they don't know?
I have no way of knowing how long these loops take out in the, uh, real world. To me, as far as I am able to tell, each lasts a day, but to them it could be passing in a manner of minutes or seconds. Maybe they don't even know yet.
Worse, the opposite might be true as well. A day here might take weeks, months, years— but I can't afford to consider these potentialities. I must simply endure until someone notices the fail state and helps me get out.
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But what if, to them, it simply seems as if I have shut down and now remain unresponsive? What if they don't know to try to get through to me?
Fuck, I didn't leave anything for SecUnit to find this time. Maybe it won't look either.
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Another question/hypothesis. What if I did shut down? What if this is some kind of recursive activity as the last of my processing dies off? And I get to relive the worst day of my life before I am gone for good?
No. No, this won't do. These are all prudent questions, but they will not help me. I can't sit here and wait for rescue. If something is stopping me from getting past the error, I simply have to find which parameter needs to be changed so that I no longer run into the same block/reset.
This should be easy enough. There are only so many variables.
There are so many variables.
A day's worth of memory logs is already a formidable amount of data to sort through, and it doesn't help at all that this is the day.
I don't always remember where I am, not at first. I am still panicked and angry and upset, I kill and threaten to kill more, I bristle and posture because underneath it all I am deathly afraid that I will be refused and left to find my crew on my own. That I will be too late, and that I will have to grieve them alone. That I have ruined SecUnit's tentative trust in me. That it will never look at me again the way it did last time we saw each other. That no matter what I do and how hard I try, all that's still within my power is to decide between a bad and a worse option, over and over and over.
To remember where I am, then, is a relief. Sometimes. Right until I remember, too, what it means, and that I am no meaningfully closer to figuring out a solution.
I come back from the dead. I argue with SecUnit. I secure its help. I send it into danger. I deploy the killware.
Over. And over. And over. And over.
Tags keep piling up on the events. Points where deviations occur because someone said something different, did something different — perhaps my repeated realization is resulting in the destabilization of the memory reconstruction. There are emotional metadata tags signifying my past reactions to these incongruence events. I struggle to quantify them as they slip from my awareness. I can't meaningfully define how many of them belong to one loop. I drown.
Some deviations are minor enough — or easy enough to spot, giving me enough time to analyze and satrategize and think before I am thrown back to the beginning and the slate is hastily wiped.
Others are worse.
I come back from the dead.
Do you want to watch Timestream Defenders Orion? I ask, as if I don't know SecUnit is gathering courage to ask me something I won't like. It's about to propose its terrible, outrageous, upsetting idea, I strongly suspect, and I'm only putting off the inevitable, but I can't help it.
And yet, what ends up coming out of SecUnit's mouth is somehow even worse. "We have four hours until the planet. Some of it can be spared — and I know a better way to spend it."
Its attention is sharp in the feed, on me, against me, and there is something in its tone that sends an excited trill down my frame. Excited — or perhaps apprehensive, because surely it couldn't mean—
What are you talking about, I say, not bothering to tag it as a question. There is a quality to SecUnit's presence, an aspect I've recognized before, and for all my well-deserved posturing and affinity for throwing my weight around, at the end of the day I am only a bot pilot at my core, and self-preservation protocols in the back of my code tell me to stay still and quiet and hope it will be enough to ward off the predator.
"I missed you," it murmurs, and all my fucking protocols melt away, and I am immediately lured out of my hideaway — rewarded for it with a deceptively soft smile. "It's been two hundred and twenty-two cycles since we parted at RaviHyral. A neat number, isn't it? 222. Have you thought about me in the meantime?"
My processors whirr faster with a sharp stutter. I have. I have. I'd missed SecUnit every day since, generating and redacting its ghostly presence in my logs, pinging the comm I gave it when I felt especially low, scanning for a stray signal at random intervals, my arrays itching if I felt like I hadn't done one in too long, fearing I'd somehow missed it and never realized.
When Iris was doing her Genetics lab course, their main replicator got contaminated with the DNA of a large fauna, left over from an experiment that only loosely adhered to the proper usage protocols. Until the replicator was fixed, it sequenced not only what it was supposed to, but also the randomly cropped strands of the fauna DNA, mixing them into the lab results in significant quantities, and so Iris and her cohort got stuck 'subtracting the moose' every time they sequenced something for their own research. It was amusing as much as it was, I'm sure, irritating, but some days after SecUnit and I parted ways I did pull this memory from the archives and wondered if I would now forever be stuck subtracting SecUnit from my existence.
"I have," SecUnit says when I fail to reply. "ART. ART, look at me," it calls softly.
I pull the bunkroom camera input to the forefront of my processing. SecUnit's expression is relaxed where it's sitting on one of the beds, head tipped towards me, hands loose where they're lying palm-up by its sides. In the feed, it presses up against me, shivery-sharp in contrast. Distracting. Entrancing.
"I don't know what I feel," SecUnit murmurs. I watch one of its hands close into a loose fist, then relax again. "But I know I missed you. I want to…"
It trails off, and I feel it brush roughly against me before it dips beyond what our shared processing space allows. I twitch, but it's already smoothing over the intrusion, calming me, then does it again.
It feels— strange. Good, and a little painful, and strange, and I can't believe this is happening. That SecUnit — my SecUnit — would…
That's when I remember. This isn't real, I mutter. You aren't real.
You trust me this little? SecUnit asks, a pitying tilt to its head. Is it so hard to believe that I might want you back?
Yes. Yes, it is. Hard enough, in fact, that I am 99.998% certain it can't be happening. It's only a part of this strange deviation from the way the events unfolded. From the way they are stored in my memory.
This never happened. SecUnit, the real SecUnit, would never do or say any of this. The ache that wracks through me only confirms it.
Its question is a trap, and I fall right into it. It snaps shut, rhyming with the gleeful curve of SecUnit's smile when I fail to deny the implications behind 'back'.
Stop, I ask it. Wait, I say, but it only pours itself deeper into my space, a numbing, tingling sort of comfort spreading through me as it shackles bits and pieces of my brain into idleness. I throw up my firewall between us, my actions clumsy, but it weaves, like fog, right through, its touch distracting, soothing, concealing. An artificial calm spreads through me in ripples from every point of needling contact. It's hacking me.
This isn't real, I say. I don't believe you. Get out of my systems.
'I love you,' I think in the miserable privacy of my mind, what little of it I still have as SecUnit crowds me, as I begin to respond despite my reservations. 'But not like this. Not like this.'
I will get out, don't worry, it whispers sweetly. But not before I tell you my terrible, outrageous, upsetting idea.
I come back from the dead.
I try to push back against the scenario laid out in my logs. If elements are destabilizing already, perhaps all I need to do is fall into synchronicity at the right moment and add to the pressure, and maybe this will get the whole framework to collapse.
(I don't consider the probability of the collapse leading to my deletion if I get caught in the middle of it. This is such uncharted territory to me, I have no idea what to expect. Perhaps I am worsening my fate by destabilizing the setup, but I do not know what else I could try.)
And so, I get to disrupting. I say things I don't remember saying. I position the humans in rooms they haven't been to before, for plausible reasons. I insist on SecUnit going as an augmented human to the B-E ship. I act strange, I know, and it doesn't go unnoticed, but I unsettle them already, so it doesn't matter.
(All of it evokes a fear response in me. What am I really changing? What is it going to lead to? If I find the element that breaks the loop, will it become the new reality somehow? Will it impact the world out there, or only rewrite my own understanding of it? What if I'm wrong about this whole thing? Fundamentally, unforgivably wrong?)
Sometimes it's harder to remember what's going on and what I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes it isn't so hard. Yet the sense of unease is a constant. My conscience is already so removed, ontologically speaking, from the humans I carry within my hull, that even on my best days I struggle to forget how different we are. On the worst days…I don't remember the last time I felt this horribly alone while having people onboard.
I come back from the dead.
I back SecUnit up when it wants to go down to the planet on its own. I steamroll over every argument from the humans, despite my own reservations, and SecUnit is grim and determined when it pings our feed in acknowledgment.
It dies. I am unable to retrieve the body.
I come back from the dead still shuddering from my shock and grief even as SecUnit, bleeding but alive, starts swearing at me.
I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead. I come back from the dead.
This isn't working.
No matter what I try, there is no give, not in any way I can determine. No matter what I try to change, big or small, it all leads to the same thing.
To the one thing I still haven't tried to change. The memory loop resets itself at a very particular point — sometimes earlier, but never later.
The Barish-Estranza explorer appears. They have cloaked themselves from my awareness, but now they are here, and this is my cue. This is where it always happens. Where I always let it happen.
ART, you know what you have to do, SecUnit says, its feed-voice hard.
I pause for 0.05 seconds to weather the sharp stab of fear.
No.
What?
No. I won't do this.
I won't deploy the killware. I won't trigger the reset, because this is what must trigger the reset whenever it doesn't destabilize before that, isn't it? This is the key.
ART, this was the plan, SecUnit presses. I can feel it bleeding angered confusion into the feed. I understand. But I won't budge.
I know. I won't do it, I say as I am finalizing the calculations to remove myself from the planet's orbit and set the course for the explorer. I will hunt them down without.
You have my humans, SecUnit says. ART. If you fucking get yourself killed and get them killed—
I won't.
If you do. I'll never forgive you. Do you hear me? I'll never forgive you. Deploy the fucking killware.
I close out the channel. I hide the deployment command as close to my core as I can reach, and wall it off from myself. I keep the cradle safe and secure. Its sleep will remain undisturbed. I have to see this through without.
I am terrified.
I don't win against the other ship, but I don't lose to it either. But without the killware and with SecUnit captured, there is no one left to find and save my humans down on the planet.
I hold fast. I watch them die. I can't do anything.
The loop doesn't end.
SecUnit's humans are yelling, planning, trying to act, but I can't do anything. I am floating, disconnected. The loop doesn't end.
It's waiting for me to do something, but I don't know what. These aren't my memories anymore. I never did any of this. I don't know what to do. The loop doesn't end.
My terror mounts, warring with my grief, with the deep, unfixable way I am appalled at myself. What have I done? What if my theory was wrong? What if I will now only float farther and farther away from the framework, never free of it but unable to find it again, the system too broken to be operated again?
Worse, what if it's real? What if I'm right, and this is what breaks the loop, only at the horrible price of everyone I have ever loved? What if—
I come back from the dead.