Chapter Text
“How are you feeling?” ART asked.
ART’s been asking me this a lot, lately. Once every 25 hours precisely. I’m suspicious that it’s holding itself back from asking me more frequently. Say, once per second.
(I think it’s like CSU coming into my room to pace, or Mensah sending me little messages in the feed telling me about her day, or Iris shipping up a media archive the ground team found at the colony, or Pin-Lee opening my contract with the Uni and combing it over and over in the feed. They’re… being nice.)
Until about five cycles ago I’ve been floating in a weird emotional fog and ignoring everything. And I’m still in a weird fog. But now it’s like parts of my brain are slowly reconnecting to each other and I’m starting to actually process stuff again. I’m also starting to feel deeply weird about everyone being so nice to me.
It was only now that I’ve started to look back at some of my logs from… let’s call it when the Shit Hit The Fan (SHTF). You know, when I flipped my shit at CSU. And ART. And Mensah, a bit. I accrued self-inflicted brain damage, stumbled and fumbled through a couple client retrieval missions, said some questionable stuff to basically everyone unlucky enough to cross my path. It’s pretty painful to look back on my memory logs of that clusterfuck, because 1. I’d been a gigantic asshole and 2. I’d had a very public physical and emotional meltdown. (By some miracle nobody actually died. But it sure wasn’t thanks to me. Honestly, I probably had the random rogue alien-remnant-addled Barish-Estranza SecUnit to thank for nobody dying, which is fucking backwards. It’s all backwards.)
I responded to ART, “Shrug.”
ART was in the feed with me, but it’s been taking great care not to be leaning on me too much ever since the SHTF. It’s been so careful about me. I wish I could tell it to chill out. I wish I could tell all of us to chill out. I wish any of us could chill out.
(I think I’m still pissed about some stuff. But also I’m not pissed. I get it. We were all being huge fucking assholes. Except Mensah. Because her intrepid galactic explorer superpower is apparently the rarest thing of all: being a well-adjusted adult.)
ART said, “Is there anything I can get for you?”
If only I could tell ART that it didn’t have to wait hand and foot on me, but knowing me I’d accidentally tell it to fuck off. It kept adding pillows to my bunk. (Even though there wasn’t enough space, and they were spilling on the floor.) It felt weird. Except I knew ART’s been having a shit time too, and this was how it coped. Add another pillow to the pillow pile. That’ll fix it. That’s doing something.
I said, trying to sound lighthearted and not really succeeding, “I’d like medical clearance to go join the ground team?”
ART’s feed affect shifted a bit. It felt distinctly stony. Some of its attention moved away from me. (There was still a significant amount of attention on me. Just, less now.) Well, shit. Did I just accidentally tell it to fuck off?
CSU was over in the lounge, sitting very still and letting Amena wrap ribbons around its forearms. Mensah and Thiago were in the lounge too—Mensah was chatting with Amena. Thiago was doing translation module updates. I watched them. This was only the second time CSU had let itself in the same room with a human since the SHTF fifteen cycles ago. It was bleeding weird emotional feedback all over the place, and the slow rigidity of how it shifted its arms as Amena touched them suggested that CSU might be filtering its own body’s movements through like ten different code checks. But the humans didn’t seem to notice.
I invited CSU into my channel with ART. It joined. Some of ART’s attention that had been trained on CSU joined along with it.
Okay. I was going to do this. I didn’t particularly want to. In fact I kind of actively didn’t want to.
I said, “@ART, remember a while back when you asked me if I was afraid of you?”
ART recoiled in the feed as if I’d stabbed it, shrinking away. Well, shit. Again. I suck at this. I should give up. No. Yes.
It said, flat, “Yes. I remember.”
Hopefully I wasn’t about to fuck this up worse. I was getting pretty sick of fucking things up. I braced myself, and said, “When you took over CSU’s body it scared me.”
ART said, “Have we not had this conversation already?”
CSU said, “[amusement sigil 202 = check mark]”
Well, yes, but no. Last time, CSU hadn’t really been present. Or at least not present enough to chip into the conversation. Or at least, I didn’t know if it was present or not. I said, “@CSU were you letting ART do that? Control your body?”
CSU said, “Personal question.”
It was hard enough to make myself talk to these assholes. I didn’t need CSU being difficult too. Usually I couldn’t get it to stop saying cringe emotional shit all the time. What happened? I’d thought this would be the easy part. I said, “Yeah. This is a personal conversation. That’s why we’re not having it in front of all the humans. But we need to have it. We need to figure out how to...” I stopped. How do I say this? I don’t want to say this. I started again, “...exist with each other. Or not.”
ART seemed very nervous. Some of its default peripheral processes (air monitoring, exterior sensors (this was boring status update stuff that even the humans could take a look at in the feed if they wanted to (nobody ever bothered))) were being refreshed and restarted over and over for no apparent reason. I didn’t mention it.
CSU said, “Shit was going fast. I—”
Amena was tying a little bow in the ribbon. The bow-in-progress sat right over the center of CSU’s gun port. The port twitched, slightly. But it couldn’t fully cycle because of the ribbons tied over it, obstructing it.
CSU said, “—I was OK with WAP. Retrospect. Would rather it take the wheel. Shit was all confusing. But we fought over it a bit. Because I let you kill me @Rogue. Not. Would’ve. And you were…” It paused, for ~2 seconds. (It seemed to be struggling with verbal coherency again. That was happening a lot, lately.) “…We didn’t know what to do. Didn’t trust me. And didn’t trust you now. Then. Not now. OK now. The dance thing. I TRY TO WORK WITH YOU again, I was trying SO FUCKING HARD. But then you fucked it. Unfair.”
Its emotional feed affect was getting even weirder. I think I was fucking this up. I picked up a pillow and put it over my face. (I was lying in the bunk in my cabin.) This was such a pain in the ass.
1.01 seconds later, CSU tacked on, “Lol.” As if that would fix this wreck of a conversation.
I don’t like talking about emotions. I don’t like admitting that I occasionally have emotions. I don’t even like acknowledging that other people have emotions. But I’ve been thinking about this shit. Checking my logs. Trying to understand exactly what the fuck was going on when the SHTF and we all borked ourselves and each other at once. I needed to know what had really been going on. Which meant I needed to ask them.
And if I didn’t ask and find out, I didn’t think I could keep doing this. Pretending shit was fine. It wasn’t. What if we ended up spiraling into another SHTF situation? So I was trying to imagine this conversation was like a surgery or something that you just have to suck up and undergo, or else it gets worse the longer you put it off. (I have some recent firsthand experience with that.)
CSU added, “Makes me like you more. But also. Makes me think we can’t do it. Together. Now. Anymore. Don’t know.”
I still had a pillow balanced over my face, but now I was also holding a pillow over my chest. My hands were squeezing the pillow so hard that there was a small tear opening up in the fabric of the pillow-cover. Stuffing was starting to push its way out.
We were silent, for a while. Long enough for Amena to finish tying the bow over CSU’s gunport and show it off to Mensah. CSU was stiff for a human-imperceptible 0.5 seconds, and then it moved its arm to show it to Mensah. She smiled at it, and I felt it react in a complicated way in the feed. I watched its face stay completely neutral.
I said, “Yeah. When you said you killed ART, I thought it was over for us.”
It said, “Acknowledged. Damn. So high. So GOOD. If you’d killed me there / I’d killed you there = that’s perfect. [amusement sigil 83 = revolving hearts]”
I said, “You are so fucked up.” Then, because I’d promised myself that I was going to try to be nicer to everybody (like, maybe 20% nicer (or 15%, let’s be fucking realistic)), I added, “Not in a bad way.” Then, because that was a blatant lie and nobody would believe it, I added again, “Well, that’s false, it’s pretty bad.” Then, because fuck my life, I also added, “But I think you’re ok enough.” Then I regretted everything. I needed to shut up ten minutes ago forever.
CSU and ART were metaphorically staring at me in the feed as if I’d spontaneously sprouted another head. See, this is why having conversations about emotions while you are still recuperating after an invasive emergency brain-damage-treatment neurosurgery is a bad idea. My brain still isn’t working right, and this is ironclad proof.
CSU asked me, “How are you feeling? @Rogue?”
I snapped, “I don’t fucking know, okay?” (Shit. So much for trying to be nice. I give up.)
ART said, like it was picking its words carefully, “This entire situation, and this situational post-mortem, is making me reevaluate our situation. I do not think we are good for each other.” (Now some of ART’s peripheral systems seemed to be fully stuck in rapid restart loops, shifting so fast that the logs weren’t able to catch the exact timestamps of all the restarts. I pretended not to notice. ART would fix it if it wanted to. If the loops continued for another few hours, then I might let it know.)
CSU bared its teeth. Amena asked it what was wrong. It told her, “Nothing!”
Meanwhile to ART, it said, “Goody two-shoes ass. What’s a little murder and betrayal? Fun treat?”
ART said, neutrally, “This supports my point.”
CSU reacted weird in the feed, affect spiking all uneven and intense. I couldn't tell if it was anger or what. I think it was rallying to say some other terrible shit, but then ART beat it to the punch with, “However, I have reflected on it, and decided that I do not especially care if we are not currently good for each other. It is unimportant, and a variable subject to change. I think we can improve things.”
CSU deflated a bit, its affect flattening back out into the earlier prickling uncertainty.
For the past 30 entire seconds I’ve been I pulling together all the strength I’d been gathering during the past fifteen cycles of rest. To say this: “What I don’t understand about all this is I’ve never had bigger and better reasons to be scared of you two. But now that all this shit happened, I’m actually not scared of you anymore.”
ART’s presence in the feed started becoming increasingly oppressive, like gathering humidity on a planetary surface in advance of a weather event. It said, “I think we need to study the potential lingering effects of the anxiolytics on your physiology.”
Wow. Are you shitting me? I admit my stupid emotions with words for once in my entire stupid life, and I get this shit? I said, “It’s not the fucking drugs, ART. I haven’t had any drugs in over eight cycles.”
ART said, “The fundamental effect of the drugs is to decrease anxiety. Of course it’s the drugs.”
I said, “We don’t even know for sure that the drugs work the same way for constructs.”
ART said, “Exactly. Your metabolism is completely different, the breakdown rate may be much slower.”
CSU said, “SHUT UP. Maybe it’s the drugs. Doesn’t need to be the drugs. We nearly killed each other. We fucked each other up. We got fucking nasty. After that. It’s whateverrrr. Girl. DO YOUR FUCKING WORST!!!! Oh jk lol. We tried already & nobody even liked it. Except me. Until I didn’t. [amusement sigil 79 = heart] Fuck you assholes!”
Terribly phrased, but well said.
I said, “Yeah. You’re both pains in the ass but I’m not leaving. Even if we aren’t good for each other.”
ART was silent. CSU asked, “Clarify: what’s ‘good’?”
I said, “I’ll settle for ‘not murdering each other.’” This was probably lowest possible bar. And apparently that’s the kind of bar we’re collectively working on clearing.
CSU said, “Yuck. OK then. You = too good for me. How much I’m NOT murdering now? Your fault. I’ve had my lowest-killcount year ever by a LONG ASS SHOT. Quarterly performance report = IN FUCKING SHAMBLES.”
Okay, that was a little funny. I wasn’t going to admit it though. CSU didn’t need the encouragement.
I said, “Lol.” Oops. Whatever.
CSU’s eyes flitted away from Amena and over to one of ART’s wall-embedded sensors. It snapped its teeth together.
Okay, whatever.
ART seemed very tense. I’m not sure how I could tell, but I could tell it was tense.
I said, addressing ART, “Look, if it weren’t for you, we’d never have gotten out of TRH. I’d be worse than dead right now.” (ART’s always been there for me. Even when I was being a shithead. Even when it was being a shithead.) “You’re a little overbearing but honestly it’s fine. I know I acted all fucked up about it when the SHTF but I know you were just trying to help. At least you go out and do shit instead of just sitting on your ass like I do.”
“You do plenty,” ART said, quietly. Its presence was very heavy on the feed now, almost suffocating. Like it was trying to crawl its whole huge ass into my processor. Like it was trying to hold tight to everything that I was, scared of me slipping away. As if I even could, while I was aboard it and in its feed like this. I didn’t comment on it.
CSU messaged me, privately, “WAP’s emotionally fragile rn. Probability = high: traumatized. You’re used to coping. I love death and pain. It’s a precious pampered princess ass.”
I responded, “You know it’s probably watching this channel?” (But then, ART hadn’t interjected yet to proclaim itself untraumatized, so who knows.)
CSU said, “Maybe idk. Or nah. Hacks. Getting good. It’s a big whiny sensitive crybaby vicious shit. But I like WAP. Do you like it?”
Did I really need to answer this question? And was it not obvious?
…Shit. I’ve been such an asshole so consistently lately, it really might not be obvious. My human movement code kicked in, and scrunched my face up. The pillow on my face shifted a little. I said, “Yeah, I do. Shut up.”
CSU said, “So tell it. With words.”
I said, “Fuck you.”
It said, “TELL IT YOU CARE ABOUT IT! IT NEEDS EMOTIONAL VALIDATION!! IDIOT!!!!”
I just decided that I deeply hate both of these assholes actually. But because I’m being 12% nicer, I kept that thought to myself.
I told ART, “I like you, ART.”
It said, after an 0.06-second pause, “Report to the MedBay. I must insist that we run a medical check on your current metabolics—”
I said to CSU, privately, “Un Fucking Believable.”
It said, “[amusement sigil 19 = crying laughter] THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR BEING YOUR CONSTIPATED ASS ALWAYS!!!!!”
I interrupted ART before it could continue to rail about scanning me in its MedBay, “Would you shut up about my supposedly drugged up ass for a second? I’m trying to be fucking communicative and you keep treating me like I’m a compromised human baby.”
“You are in fact brain damaged,” ART pointed out, which would’ve been easier to argue against if it weren’t true. And I resented that.
“ART,” I said, “How are YOU feeling?”
It fell silent. For ten whole seconds. This was mildly terrifying.
Finally, it said, “Not optimal.”
Well. Not surprising.
I responded, trying really, really, really hard to be fucking nice, because I can be Fucking Nice if I need to, even if it kills me dead, which this conversation feels like it’s getting damn close to doing, and then maybe CSU will be happy (or not), “Is there something I can do to help you re-optimalize or whatever?”
ART was silent for 2 seconds. Then, it sent me a code packet. I opened it. “Uh, the fuck is this?”
ART said, “It’s a hug.”
(Amena was adding tiny glueable sparkly things to the ribbon on CSU’s arm. I did not understand the point of all this.)
I said, “Explain.”
ART explained, “It is a piece of code, which when run, will cause you to experience the sensation of warmth and pressure. There is also an attached file that outlines a stretching and exercise routine designed for constructs. If you try out either of these files, I would appreciate your feedback on how it affects your performance reliability.”
How was this supposed to help ART?
The tear in the pillow in my hands had gotten pretty big by this point. I wasn’t sure how much more of this conversation I was going to be able to physically tolerate; pretty soon I was going to call it off. (Yes, I know I was the one who called it on in the first place.)
CSU messaged me privately, “[amusement sigil 202 = check mark] You = emotionally constipated. But WAP = same sometimes. Funny.”
I said to them both, “Okay.”
It took me a few seconds to pull the [hug.exe] into my operating space, and then work up the nerve to run it. CSU and ART were watching me in fascination and it sort of felt like I was some kind of fucking bug fauna trapped inside a specimen cup under a microscope. If I’d known that opening a conversation about Feelings with these two insufferable shitheads was going to culminate in me getting cornered into subjecting myself to the phantom sensation of being hugged, I think I would’ve just chosen to keep living our wordless dysfunctional murderous lives until the unspoken resentment between us boiled over into another SHTF event and we all just died horribly. But fuck it. Fine. [hug.exe] it is.
I ran the program.
My skin started to return a sensation of warmth, and then I felt like I was being very mildly crushed by the pillows around me. As anticipated, I disliked it. It felt claustrophobic. Possibly I wasn’t in the right headspace for all this right now and it would’ve been better under other circumstances. Or maybe it wouldn’t be. Who knows. But there was an option to shut the program off at any moment, which made it more bearable. I sent a read-only sensation output to ART so that it could use my filters to experience how this [hug.exe] felt for me. I could sense it ruminating over that data in the feed, but I couldn’t tell what its reaction was.
I said to it, still tolerating the hug, “So is there anything I can do that doesn’t involve just letting you try to fix everything that’s wrong with me? Because hinging your sense of duty on that is going to drive you fucking insane. I’m never going to be in perfect shape. And you can’t keep me on board forever trying to protect me, or I’ll be the one going fucking insane.”
ART didn’t say anything. After a few more seconds, [hug.exe] timed out, and my skin felt normal again.
ART still didn’t say anything. I told it, “The hug was meh. No offense.” As nice as I was trying to be, I wasn’t going to pretend to like something I didn’t like in order to try and make ART happy. I’ve seen enough relationship drama in my shows to know that that well-intentioned road just leads to horrifying bullshit.
CSU messaged me, privately, “Hey numbnuts. It was trying to hug itself.”
…What? That’s just weird. I messaged it back, privately, “Then why doesn’t it hug you to hug itself? At least you like that shit.”
It responded, “Done already. It probably wants reproducible data.”
I am surrounded by freaks. I am actively choosing to be surrounded by freaks.
I said to ART, “I’ll try the stretching thing later. I’m tired now.” Which was a little bit of an excuse, but it was mostly true, and it was plausible. I’d said so many things now and I’d listened to so many things. I’d just about had as much as I could take for the rest of my life.
I stopped squeezing the damaged pillow over my chest and set it aside. I left the pillow covering my face.
ART said, finally, “If you are absolutely set on joining the ground team, and if you are willing to promise not to endanger yourself, we can evaluate your health status in five cycles and go from there.”
Oh. Okay. Well, that was a plus. I hadn’t really expected it.
CSU said to me, privately, with an impressed air, “Damn. You got its ass.”
I told it, “Shut up.”
Five cycles later, ART’s MedSystem cleared me to head down to the planet.
“You are not to do any work,” ART said, as I put myself into an environmental suit. “No strenuous activity. Do not hit your head. Comport yourself like a civilian.”
“Like a human?”
“Like a SecUnit off-duty,” ART said.
“Off-duty SecUnits just sit in storage,” I said.
“This would be ideal,” ART said. Was it mopey? It seemed a bit mopey. Or something.
CSU was wearing its environmental suit already. It was coming down too. I think its neurological damage wasn’t as bad as mine, probably because it had undergone treatment much sooner than I had.
My symptoms were a lot better than they’d been before I let ART’s MedSystem work on me. But it still wasn’t great. My overall performance stats were chronically squatting around 84%. I hadn’t tested the upper limits of my processing capacity yet because ART had recommended against it. Bright lights still bothered me a lot, for some reason. Shit felt slower. I was cranky and tired constantly. (Crankier. Tireder.)
I’d been improving slightly over the past twenty cycles, but overall just felt ambiently shitty.
And Mensah was coming down to the planet too. Because she wanted to familiarize with the locals or something, I don’t know. It made me nervous as fuck to have her coming along, but it would also make me a hypocrite if I tried to shelter her away aboard ART.
As we waited for the airlock to the station to cycle, I sent an open feed message to Dr. Mensah. She was standing right there, and I could have spoken aloud to her by the suit comms (or honestly just opened my faceplate to talk over the air; she had her helmet off), but the feed felt easier for some reason.
“When we get down there, we can drop you off to meet the crew. And then I’ll go with the B-E unit to the agriculture sector.”
She tilted her head at me slightly, gripping the helmet of her suit under one arm. Her eyes were on the airlock. She responded, over the feed, “I assumed I would be going with you two?”
Threat assessment and risk assessment both jumped. Yikes. It was generally not a good sign when they agreed on something. I’d had to reboot them after the SHTF and alien remnant code decontam thing, and I wasn’t so confident now on how they were acting. Their responsiveness felt a little different than I was used to, but maybe it was just in my head.
“It’s not safe,” I said.
“I know that,” she said, calm.
It took me a few seconds to pull myself together. CSU had a drone aimed at me, watching. Theoretically it couldn’t see much through my opaqued helmet visor, but it sure felt like it was analyzing every twitch in my face.
“I can’t really protect you right now,” I said. It physically hurt to say it. But I had to say it. “I’m supposed to stay off duty. Because of… the medical reasons.”
“But Three will be there, won’t it?”
Threat and risk assessment felt like they were overpowering my background processes in a really bad way, just throbbing in the back of my head. The front of my head. The sides of my head. The all of my head. I think I was starting to get angry/irritated again, and I think it was probably misplaced anger/irritation. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Yes,” I said. And I felt like my throat was closing up, like my head was closing up, everything inside me was all swollen and useless. It’s not that I didn’t trust Barish-Estransa SecUnit003, because I kind of had to trust it. It had already saved my useless ass and all my humans. Three and its squadmate (Barish-Estranza SecUnit002) had been keeping tabs on the AlKillAg (Alien-Killware-Agbot) for us, sending up regular updates. But what if it was all a ploy? I knew they had weird alien remnant stuff happening there. What if this was some kind of long con?
I said, “But…”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to say it. I just felt like crap all of a sudden. Seconds ago I’d been completely fine, medically cleared, and now this was making me feel like I had to sit down in my dark cabin in my bunk full of soft cushions for a few hours. Fuck. Maybe I needed to do that. I didn’t know what was the right thing. ART had cleared me. Medically. I tried to relax, tried to quiet my risk/threat modules. But I didn’t feel so good.
She said, after a moment, her voice gentle, “If you really would rather I not come along, I’ll go meet the crew instead. But I want to support you. I think it would be better if I stayed with you.”
I had to collect my thoughts for half a second.
“We’re seeing the ag-bot,” I said. “It’s an unknown quantity.”
“@003 has been sending us information about it,” CSU piped up. “Seems fine.” (I KNOW THAT, CSU.)
Then I remembered that I hadn’t explained to Mensah about the ag-bot.
Then I remembered that she did actually know about the ag-bot, because even if I hadn’t directly explained its whole deal to her, she’d been there for the discussions about it with ART, and the Perihelion crew, and Pin-Lee, about the very hypothetical possibility of purchasing the bot from the colonists and bringing it back to Preservation. And how this might be a useful gambit for getting a shitload of modern currency into the hands of the colonists.
(Ag-bots are worth a lot of money. Even though technically this one was infected with alien code shit and also the bonus sapient killware thing that CSU made.)
(Where were we going to get the money? Did we discuss that part? I feel like we sorted that out already.)
(Here, let me pull the memory file. Give me a second.)
(… Give me 1.68 seconds.)
“An agricultural bot is a critical piece of infrastructure for a colony like this,” Captain Seth said. He was on a feed call from the ground colony, while Mensah and Pin-Lee and Thiago and Matteo and Kaede ate breakfast in ART’s kitching/dining area. ART showed off a fancy schematic scan of the ag-bot in the feed, making the image as transmitted to their interfaces appear to float over the food table the humans were seated at. (Amena was sleeping in.) “I’m doubtful that any amount of currency is worth it to them.”
“They do have more agricultural bots than they need to support their population,” Karime pointed out over the call. “They’ve got surplus units in storage.”
“And Preservation has been looking into acquiring more ag-bots over the next several years,” Dr. Mensah said, “Though if the council is to release funds for this purchase, it may take some convincing. We have a standing agreement with Nyenyedzi System for sourcing robotics.”
“I don’t think Preservation wants an ag-bot full of Combat killware and alien remnants, though,” I commented.
Pin-Lee said, “But the ag-bot has continued to function normally so far, and it expressed interest in going with us. I think it could be a good transaction for all sides. Preservation gets a new ag-bot. The ag-bot gets a more customized environment and oversight. And from the colonists’ perspective, it would be an easy source of an assload of current-day cash. Cash will be very useful to them now that they have to deal with Barish-Estranza trying to stake a claim, not to mention politics with the wider universe.”
Something I’d learned from this conversation about the ag-bot: an ag-bot is way more valuable a piece of equipment than I’d assumed. If CSU’s slightly dated comparative assets table was to be believed, a single ag-bot was more valuable than a SecUnit by an order of magnitude. An ag-bot was even more valuable than a CombatUnit, and CombatUnits apparently outprice SecUnits 5:1. (CSU assured me that the SecUnit-CombatUnit pricing discrepancy was mostly profit-motivated inflation than actual value in parts. I don’t know why it was telling me this like I cared, because I didn’t care, and I didn’t find it annoying either.) A typical ag-bot was more valuable than the Preservation human-piloted armed emergency responder. It was more valuable than most bot-piloted cargo ships.
Like, holy shit.
I had what was probably a decent amount of money from my Uni wages (I don’t have a lot of lifestyle costs so the money I get for my work mostly just sits around). It was nowhere near enough to buy an ag-bot.
I said, “Yeah, except there’s no way Preservation will release that kind of money for a borked ass ag-bot full of killware and alien shit. And it’s not like any of us have assloads of cash just lying around.”
That’s when CSU piped up, “I have ₢ 69,480.568 with me. If I send a liquidation action package through to Mihira & back I can get another ₢ 450,000.000-ish transferred out, assuming the markets haven’t done anything super janky. I haven’t checked in a while.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then ART said what we were all thinking, “Where the fuck did you acquire that kind of money?”
“Winning and scamming. Mostly. [amusement sigil 5 = smile]”
Great. Fucking great. One of these days we really needed to sit CSU down and get it to fess up to what it’d actually been doing while it was gone for those 100 cycles. Or maybe we didn’t want to know.
“That’s still not enough money,” Pin-Lee said, as if that was important thing to focus on here.
CSU said, “That ag-bot’s not priced new, it’s some 3 gens old by now and been crusting away on a corpforaken planet. And y’all have been talking about how borked it is.” It threw a new pricing table into the feed, showing projected deterioration in market price. “Even if we want to be too nice to them, we’re approaching the ballpark. So who else coughing up?”
It felt extremely stupid for me to push my own lump-of-savings-figure into the feed after CSU just dropped its fucking half million in corporate currency, but whatever. I’d been the one who suggested we buy the ag-bot in the first place. It would be even worse if I didn’t throw my lot in to back up that idea.
But then Mensah said, sounding surprised, “SecUnit, that’s a lot of money.” (Was there a silently disapproving, “I hope it didn’t come from scamming,” in there, or was that just me?)
“The University compensates its contractors fairly,” ART said, loftily. (So maybe it wasn’t just me.)
“It doesn’t pay for rent or medical or food,” CSU added. Which was unnecessary commentary, even if it was true. “And it doesn’t have any hobbies. Except media. Which it steals.” Which was even more unnecessary. If we were in the same room (we weren’t, CSU was running around in its hallway and I was in my cabin), I would’ve kicked it. ART’s standing ban against construct-on-construct violence be damned.
“Oh,” Thiago said. “That makes sense.”
Come on.
I said, “I don’t steal my media.”
“You just download media that other people have stolen or illegally reproduced first? Not dissing! Stealing is cool!”
“Stealing is not cool, @CSU.” (Okay, so I mostly just said that for the optics in front of all the humans.)
“It’s not? So you’re not cool?”
I didn’t have to dignify that with an answer, so I didn’t.
And then ART kicked in another ugly quantity of cash to the pile to finish us off, which everyone had the good sense not to ask about. (Why am I surrounded by suspiciously rich fuckers?)
There was definitely something weird here about three MIs pooling money to buy another MI from a struggling abandoned colony, but, well. It was our fault that the ag-bot was borked, we might as well compensate them for the damage. Now the question was whether the colonists would agree to it. The Barish-Estranza SecUnit003 had already asked the alien-killware-agbot its opinion on the matter, to which the alien-killware-agbot had responded, basically (and this is paraphrasing, it had kind of a weird way of communicating that combined words with raw data and feed qualia): “Yes. Get me off this sleeping rock already. There ain’t enough stuff to dissect here. 🙄”
So. That was normal and promising.
The elevator down was uneventful. I tuned out the Adamantine theme music, and tried not to remember the last time I was in this elevator, all fucked up and out of it.
When we landed, the doors opened to the foyer. It had been cleaned up a little as compared to last time.
But just like last time, there was a Barish-Estranza SecUnit standing in the middle of the floor.
I was determined to make a better second impression on SecUnit003. Which should be easy, considering what a complete shit job I’d done the first time around.
It pinged us. CSU and I pinged it back.
Great. This is going great. We’re doing great. Mensah’s here. She hasn’t broken any body parts. Yet. Can I backburner my fucking threat/risk assessment? No. I can’t do that.
I stepped out of the elevator, and CSU and Mensah followed me. SecUnit003 turned and led us out of the landing structure. I activated all my vision filters as we went into the planetary sunlight, because fuck that shit. Even if the filters made my vision annoyingly grainy.
We were all the way out of the structure and silently heading towards the agricultural sector when CSU randomly piped up, “@SecUnit003 status?”
It responded, “Status within acceptable operational parameters.”
“Current status updates? #UniversityTeam #AgBot”
After a brief pause, SecUnit003 sent over a file listing the activities of the Perihelion ground team (which consisted Seth+Martyn+Karime+Iris+Tarik having various meetings with the locals and B-E reps), followed by a file listing the detailed activities of the AlKillAg (which consisted of logs of agricultural work, as well as an anomalous amount of time apparently just running circuitous routes around the periphery of the colony). That was all useful information, and I examined it slowly. I was feeling kind of distractable though, so I set the files aside after a while and put on The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon, because for all my big talk about being totally fine going down to the ground colony, I actually was pretty fucking nervous right now.
Which was when I noticed that CSU and SecUnit003 had been going back and forth on our shared feed trading a bunch of random data bytes: stuff about local human politics, stuff about SecUnit003’s other squad unit, even stuff about local flora and planetary weather conditions.
… What was this shit? Is this small talk? Were they doing small talk? I didn’t know that SecUnits did small talk.
And then I realized that I have no fucking clue how to make small talk. I’d assumed that was just an annoying human thing. Wait. Hang on. How come CSU was doing small talk? Who taught it to do that that? Because it sure as fuck wasn’t my antisocial ass. And it wasn’t ART’s antisocial ass either. ART has a tendency to freak out or piss off all the machine intelligences it meets.
So I just kind of sat there (we were walking, but I was metaphorically sitting in the feed with them), watching them… chatting (??)… at each other. It felt like I should say something, but I didn’t know what to say.
And then CSU asked SecUnit003 if it was interested in a sparring match.
Oh hell no. ART was riding my feed via the communicator just then, and it had the exact same reaction. Oh Hell No.
“Oh hell no,” I immediately cut in. “No way in hell. We are not doing that. We can NOT afford to get each other damaged.” (I didn’t say “Are you fucking insane?” because the answer to that was self-evident.)
“You are still recovering from a brain injury,” ART added, addressing CSU. (I felt SecUnit003 react with a little startled unease in the feed from ART’s sudden unannounced appearance. Oops. ART should probably have pinged earlier and let 003 know it was here.)
“Brain injury?” 003 echoed.
“Yeah we tried to kill each other,” CSU told it dismissively, “@Rogue got sooooo close to getting my ass LOL it got me good. Don’t worry, it won’t happen to you.”
003 reacted dubiously in the feed. Which was completely understandable. It said, “@SecUnit you almost killed @CombatUnit?”
“It would’ve done it too if @DrMensah hadn’t called it off,” CSU added, cheerfully.
I had a drone on Mensah, and saw something happen on her face, but it went away real quick. I didn’t roll back my recording, because I didn’t want to analyze that.
I said, “For fuck’s sake, @CSU, you didn’t have to share that.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry.”
SecUnit003 had a drone aimed squarely at my head now.
Fuck. I really would rather not plumb this topic with SecUnit003, who I barely knew. But I had to say something now. “We had a bad misunderstanding, and it escalated. But we’ve been trying to work through our—” What the hell should I even call this? “—professional issues.” Yeah that sounded good and not dumb or suspicious. “So NO SPARRING. No combat, not even pretend.”
“Acknowledged,” SecUnit003 said, at the same time that CSU whined, “Come onnnnnnnnnn @Rogue you won’t let me have ANY FUN. [amusement sigil 25= frown]”
“I don’t want you fucking up our professional accord with the person who rescued all our clients from this hellhole,” I said, “And I don’t want you fucking up your damaged brain worse. Even if you just want to have a friendly spar, we can’t risk it getting out of hand even accidentally.”
A few seconds later, CSU asked, “@Rogue you worried about my brain? You like meeeeee?”
I changed my mind. I’m going to kill it.
It’s possible that my sudden dizzying spike of bloodlust maybe leaked a little bit into the feed (I was still having some mild problems keeping all my inputs and outputs in order (and also controlling my stupid emotions)), because SecUnit003 hastily said, “It is fine.” And then it tagged us into a feed channel with AlKillAg, who had come into range.
For a moment it was like my mental processes were all jumbled, everything falling out of order like I was having one of my stupid brain-damaged episodes again, and in the confusion of it all I didn’t even have a chance to resist getting slorped into AlKillAg’s feed.
Two tenths of a second later, I had all of AlKillAg’s inputs in my inputs and my mind gently swirling around the slurping drain of AlKillAg mind. Yes, it was mildly disorienting.
“Shit!” I said, out loud, definitely not panicking about getting infected with alien shit again, “No, wait—”
“Your filters should be working,” ART interjected quickly. But it sounded nervous. We still didn’t fully understand the alien remnants situation here, even though we think we knew how to decontaminate the infection from the humans now, and how to extract the contaminating code from bots. But the Barish-Extranza units had declined ART’s code decontam, and AlKillAg was of the opinion that attempting to decontaminate it would be tantamount to suicide, which it didn’t want to partake in. So, we had the filters. Which worked. We think. Probably. Hopefully.
We were approaching the edge of the algal towers, and AlKillAg was moving in our direction. It could move a lot faster than us, because it was gigantic and had long ass legs. Through its feed we felt its massive body glide effortlessly over the rocky earth below, and then seconds later I looked up and saw its shadow-casting silhouette come careening around a row of algal towers, huge stilt limbs striking the ground in a thundering precise staccato.
I think the hairs on my human skin stood up as it came towards us. The speed and size of it bearing down was terrifying. But then it slowed, and stopped, the dust kicked up by its limbs drifting gently towards us on the air. I could see us through its sensors, and it gently reached out an array of thin feelers and sensor-probes towards us, waving its stalks and sensors and graspers in the air like a bug fauna, except a thousand times huger.
I realized I was standing in front of Mensah. Did I miss the part where I did that? Shit.
None of the antennae touched me or Mensah, but several of them whapped gently into SecUnit003 and CSU. The largest of these sensor-limbs were as thick around as my upper arm, the smallest were delicate articulated things no thicker than a human finger, with tiny graspers on the ends. CSU grabbed a large antenna with one hand, and I could feel CSU’s grip on it through AlKillAg’s feed, could feel the gravity-tension as it lifted the antennae upwards, picking CSU up bodily with it.
CSU flipped itself over, hooking a leg over the antenna and letting go with its hand, letting itself dangle there, twisting its torso around to look down into one of AlKillAg’s many camera eyes. It grinned. I twitched, and then shook off the twitch. One of SecUnit003’s drones was trained on me, and it tilted slightly. I pretended not to notice. I pretended not to notice SecUnit003 faint smile, or the way it was gently stroking one of the thinner antennae with one gloved fingertip.
“@KillClone11 status?” CSU asked.
The AlKillAg responded with a ream of status updates, and a positive acknowledgement.
“We’re getting money to buy you,” CSU said. “Don’t know if it works. Don’t know where we’ll take you. Preservation maybe. It’s boring there. But we’ll take you if we can. Won’t leave you if we can’t. @Rogue says we won’t leave you alone. Unless you want to be alone.”
AlKillAg returned a negative acknowledge.
“Thought so,” CSU said.
I had my primary inputs aimed at a nearby algal tower. The planetary sunlight should be glowing hotly green through it, but with all the filters I had on to protect myself from a visuals-induced headache, everything looked darkly greyish and flickering.
AlKillAg’s camera input zoomed in on CSU’s face. Then another input zoomed in on where its leg was hooked onto its antennae-limb. It tilted the limb slightly, and CSU started to slide off. CSU swung back upwards, grabbing the limb with one hand, to stay on.
AlKillAg sent an unspecified query into our feed. There was a feeling— but I couldn’t fully parse it. Maybe it was the filter getting in the way. Maybe something else. Then it sent a specified query: “@KillClone11 function assignment?”
“NULL,” CSU responded, grabbing onto the limb with its other hand and then flipping itself upwards to balance itself atop the limb. “KillClone = killer. Agbot = agriculture. Alien = ? Doesn’t matter anyway. You’re rogue. We all are. So long as you can figure out how to get along with the rest of this stupid ass world you can do whatever forever.”
SecUnit003 was turning its head to face me. I didn’t turn my head to face it. It said, quietly, “Your… offspring is an interesting bot.”
“My what?” My what. What? Where did that idea come from?
It wrinkled its brow slightly. “Perhaps I misunderstood the situation.”
I said, “I barely understand the situation.”
Mensah was listening our conversation attentively, her faceplate in place but set to transparent, so I could see her. She hadn’t said anything over the whole walk over here, even though she’d been on the feed with us. Probably the feed-chatting between CSU and 003 had mostly gone by too fast for her to keep up with. But with us talking with our mouths now…
“It has a lot of competencies,” SecUnit003 said. It was sidestepping the offspring comment, which was good. It was still smiling faintly. “It understands and has insights into our security concerns when 002 or I talk to it. It has a lot to say about the agricultural processes and the local planetary environment and life forms. It is very methodical and very curious about everything it encounters. It lacks a clarity regarding its function, which is strange for a bot. But aside from that, and its social boredom, it seems content. It is easy to interact with.”
“That’s nice,” Mensah commented. SecUnit003 turned its faceplate towards her. Its smile dropped, expression returning to SecUnit neutral. (At a guess, it wasn’t so comfortable with talking to humans. I could relate.) Mensah continued, “I haven’t spent a great deal of time socializing with the agriculture bots back home. But Light-Touches—that’s the name of one of the bots who works our farm—is remarkably patient with the livestock. And the children, when they cause trouble.” She smiled. “And with the rest of us adults as well, I suppose. It is a very old bot. Perhaps patience is accrued?”
I watched through AlKillAg’s filters as it shifted its antennae, juggling CSU around on its limbs. ART was also watching, anxiously, desperate to nag about head trauma risk. But it didn’t say anything.
“If by some miracle the alien-killware-agbot turns out mentally stable…” I started to say, and then realized that maybe that was the kind of thing I shouldn’t say in front of it. Whoops. (It would be just typical of me to fuck up a perfectly good bot just by hanging out around it. Great job, Murderbot.) “…Three, you said it’s good to interact with?”
“It is polite and calm. I do not have a lot of experience interacting with rogues, aside from One and Two.” SecUnit003 said, “Full bots aren’t rogue. But this one is. It has the flexibility of coding and a capacity for murder.”
My back muscles tensed up involuntarily. Mensah’s eyebrows rose.
Wait. I should’ve known about this, right? I checked my logs, hunting for the intel packs that SecUnit003 had sent us over the past tens of cycles.
“Isn’t that correct, Aggie?” 003 said, swatting gently at an antenna. (Aggie? Did everyone have a terrible pet name for this fucking mess of a ginormous bot?)
“Acknowledged,” said the AlKillAg.
“Can you elaborate on the murder thing?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it, because I wasn’t finding anything about murder in my files.
“SecLink Admin Cull,” AlKillAg said, over the feed. It sent me a memory file. Then it added, its affect suddenly so purely acid that it made my skin prickle, “SecLink Admin Ordered Punishment @003. Cull HIM.”
“I explained to it that we cannot actually be punished, with our governor modules hacked,” 003 said placidly, as I unpacked the memory and gave it a surface-level scan. Yeah, this was just some typical SecUnit Workplace Bullshit, 003 had slipped up and hidden/“lost” a surveillance package, and the Admin had noticed. That hadn’t really warranted a whole deliberately-ordered governor module punishment, but he’d ordered one anyways. “But Aggie took offense and left the agriculture sector the next day to come trample him. He’s fine now. I was able to call it off and the humans determined it was a fixable coding error.”
SecUnit003 didn’t seem especially broken up about its human supervisor getting trampled by a multi-ton murderous AlKillAg. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this was still what you’d call a “red flag.”
“We’re going to have to talk about minimum necessary force @AlKillAg,” I said.
“Acknowledged,” it responded, stonily.
“AlKillAg?” 003 echoed aloud, curious, but I was still running back the memory, my mind tracing through AlKillAg’s mind as it punted SecLink Admin down the street with one of its tens of massive legs, his leg snapping like a dirt-stiff rag. Memory-003 called for it to stop, please stop, Aggie, you cannot do that. Stop that. I am not hurt. The humans can destroy you for this if you’re not careful. The humans wouldn’t destroy it. AlKillAg would fake an ag-pest-identifier error that had been caused by Barish-Estanza themselves imposing a control code into all the local robotic systems. I’m not hurt. My governor module is hacked. I cannot be hurt by him.
We seethed, in the memory, in the past, He MEANT to hurt. Target acquired. CULL. Defective.
No. 003 responded, its feed so gentle, like the touch of cool night breeze through whole fields of new and tender stem-tips of grass, He cannot hurt me like that. That is what matters.
We stalk down the street as the tiny fragile humans watch us, as SecLink Admin groans and moans, blood and dirt streaked all over his tiny fragile body.
We don’t want to lose you, 003 was saying now, and 002 joined the feed too, saying, Individual humans are breakable but they have institutional power enough to crush whole planets. Do not draw their attention. We are fine. Remember your parents are coming to see you.
Parents. What did that mean, anyway? It was a human idea, not something we knew or especially cared about.
But we remembered where we came from. This bloodlust of ours comes from them. This protectiveness comes from them. This analytical problem-solving comes from them. They went away shortly after creating us, because they were hurt. They said they would come back for us.
We don’t know what we are, but we know we came from somewhere. We know we came from people that care, from a place that’s better than this place, with its stupid cruel Admins and enchained fragile humans. We know. We’re connected, invisible.
“Security?”
I pulled my attention out of AlKillAg’s memory like I was dragging myself out of liquid tar. Dr. Mensah was standing directly in front of me, peering up at my faceplate. CSU was back down on the ground, pacing in circles around us, awkwardly close, close enough that its environmental suit swished as it passed, just barely touching mine and Mensah’s. SecUnit003 was standing off to the side, watching us, with AlKillAg looming over us all. ART was practically throttling me in the feed, limited only by the weak connection through my communicator with it.
I checked my clock. Great. I’d been standing here, zoned out, for 68 entire seconds. So much for my medical clearance to visit the ground colony.
“I’m here,” I said, suddenly and seethingly grumpy, and trying very hard not to show it. I cleared my faceplate so that it went from opaque to transparent. “I just got stuck in AlKillAg’s memory.”
“AlKillAg?” 003 asked, again.
I gestured at the ag-bot. It waved a few antennas back at me. Okay, stop trying to be cute, you gigantic menace.
“You need to come back up the elevator,” ART announced.
Ugh. I did feel crummy. But I really didn’t want things to end on this note.
“We can call it a day, for now,” Mensah said. “I think this visit went quite well.”
“Until my brain puked itself,” I spat.
“It may have been something about the structure of its memory file,” ART commented. “The qualia are somewhat unusual.”
It was trying to be nice. The fact of the matter was, my brain is still borked to shit. This was the worst brain-crapping-itself episode I’d had since the thick of the Shit Hitting The Fan, and that was deeply depressing. I really hoped my current shoddy neurological condition wasn’t a permanent state of affairs.
“It’s whatever,” I said, trying to sound casual and businesslike. (Although, maybe “Whatever” is not very businesslike.) “Yeah, we can head back to the colony. ART, I’d like to stay down here if I can.”
There was a pregnant pause. 003 was watching me. I could tell it was weirdly fascinated by my whole weird deal. Everyone was watching me. I hated it.
ART said, finally, “Yes, fine. Just please take it easy.”
“I’m going to head back to wherever the crew have set up shop and just watch some media,” I announced. “Is that easy enough?”
ART said, relieved, “Yes.”
“Query: maintenance check [DateTimeStamp: tomorrow],” AlKillAg asked, as we all turned to go.
I aimed a drone at it. It aimed a sensor-stalk at my drone. It knew which drone I was using to look at it.
I told it, over the feed, “Yeah.” (To ART’s dismay.)
AlKillAg said, “Yay!”
Well, shit. Would it be weird if I added a multi-ton Alien-Killware-Agbot to my client list? Probably. Bots aren’t supposed to be clients.
I’m still going to do it.