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Chapter Text

I came out of shutdown to find myself strapped to a table in a dark room. Not the most welcoming scenario. 

I struggled, but after a second I was inundated with a sickeningly familiar pain; a stabbing electric jolt right at the base of my skull.

I froze, shocked, and frantically checked my system code. 

Oh no. Fuck, no. No no no no no. 

My governor module was functioning. The hack had been patched. 

How? 

I had to pause for a moment, because my circulatory system was pumping so fast that I was dizzy and at risk of a system failure. When I was slightly more stable, I took a deep breath and dove deeper into the details. 

Current Orders:

• Don't struggle
• Answer questions
• Be honest

Client Designation: Perihelion. 

What. 

"ART!" I shouted at the top of my lungs, hoping that either I was on ART or it was riding a feed near enough to hear me. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

A display screen near me turned on suddenly. (It was lucky that my eyes adjusted to light changes better than a human, or I would have been blinded.) It was displaying three pictures. 

"Do you recognize these humans?" ART asked over the intercom, sounding dispassionate. 

I wanted to scream at it. I wanted to tell it to go fuck itself. I wanted to find the dirtiest, most underhanded way of hurting its feelings and stab it where it would hurt the most. I wanted-

The governor module sent a fresh jolt of energy that had me writhing against the table.

I looked at the pictures. 

"Yes." I snarled, through gritted teeth. "That is Iris, Seth, and Tarik. Your crew. Why-"

And then I stopped, because there was strange and offputting information associated with each of those humans, information that I couldn't properly integrate into my understanding of the situation. 

"Why did you order me to kill three of your crew?"

"I did not."

"They're registering as targets, you piece of shit, if you didn't do that, what did?"

"That," ART said, sounding impatient, "is what I am attempting to discern."

Oh, wonderful. Fantastic. Not only had ART forcibly taken control of my brain, but something or someone else had been rummaging around in there too. It was my lucky day, I guess. 

"ART, what the fuck is going on?"

It actually sighed over the intercom. I could have strangled it, if it had had a neck. And I hadn't been strapped down to a table. 

"You were on an information gathering mission with Iris, Seth, and Tarik." ART said flatly. "Midway through proceedings, something anomalous occurred, and you suddenly began treating my crew as targets to be eliminated."

Oh. 

Fuck. 

I hadn't killed them...had I? Surely not. Surely ART wouldn't have kept me alive if I had. Unless it wanted to torture me in revenge. I was strapped to a table, after all. I felt cold and clammy. ART could do whatever it wanted with me. It was very clever, and it was ruthless and violent when it wanted to be, and it could keep me alive with its med system through an awful lot of damage, and right now it was in command of my governor module. If ART wanted me to suffer, it was in a perfect position to make that happen. 

I shut up.

"You aimed your energy weapons at Iris and Seth." It continued, in the same monotone voice. It sent chills up my spine. "When that method of attack failed, you grabbed Iris by the neck and attacked her physically. Then you began hacking into all of their feed interfaces to harm them that way."

It wasn't telling me whether there had been casualties. God, I hoped there hadn't been casualties. I almost asked, and then thought better of it. ART wasn't telling me for a reason: I was compromised. You didn't tell the compromised party how close the mission had come to succeeding. 

"The only way to get you back under control was to reactivate your governor module." ART concluded. "And it will remain on until I have determined the source of this behavior and have developed a solution to prevent it from happening again."

That...okay, that actually made sense. That was a lot less of an aggressive betrayal of our friendship than it had appeared when I had woken up with ART's name stamped on my bomb collar. The way ART phrased it gave me hope that it was going to release me at some point, and not just keep me chained up and governed forever. I still didn't like it. My skin was crawling just knowing that the governor module was active. But I had de-escalated from trying to think of ways to destroy ART before it could destroy me. 

"I am going to enter your systems now." It told me. "I require you to be awake for this process. It may be unpleasant. Do not make this any harder than it needs to be."

I was not a huge fan of the menacing tone ART was using. But it's good that ART warned me, because its entrance to my mind was abrupt and disconcerting. It expanded to fill every bit of space that I wasn't taking up, and then without any further discussion it began scanning through my code. 

I tried to watch what it was doing, but it shoved me out of the way and boxed me into a corner. I lay in deafening silence and tried to remember that I trusted ART. My wrists ached from the straps digging into them. 

I am going to begin commenting out possibly problematic code. ART informed me. If you notice negative effects, alert me immediately.

I fought the urge to squirm on the table and just pinged an acknowledgement. This was why ART wanted me awake, so I could tell it when it broke something important. That didn't fill me with confidence. 

After 32 seconds, my vision went black. I tried switching to different filters, but nothing worked. I can't see. I told ART. 

I will revert the most recent changes. Tell me when your vision returns. It instructed. 

Almost immediately, my vision returned. Now.

Good. It moved on.

Nearly a minute later, my chest seized up. It took a moment for me to understand what the problem was; I no longer had control over the muscles responsible for breathing. I informed ART, and it fixed the issue. We continued like this for a while.

The longer ART spent in my head, the more my fear and anger and anxiety became muted. There was something soothing about the process of ART picking through my code. It was almost like getting a massage, but without all the gross physical touching. Or like when Iris or Amena brushed my hair. It felt nice. Weirdly nice. I felt guilty for feeling nice in this kind of situation. 

ART? I asked. 

Yes?

Are you okay?

It didn't respond, but I felt some of its attention shift back towards the conscious me, the part of me that was boxed into a corner. 

If something happened that forced you to attack Dr. Mensah and Ratthi and Pin-Lee I'd be losing my shit way harder than it seems like you are. I admitted. 

I have had ample opportunity to 'lose my shit' already. It said. It has been several cycles since the anomalous event occurred.

Oh. That made sense.

I have woken you up twelve times since then. It continued. The event un-linked nearly all of your memory files and corrupted your ability to form long term memories. I had to address those issues before I could reach the current stage of teasing out the underlying malware itself. I expect that this will be the first of the conversations we've had in the past few cycles which you will remember going forward.

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing. 

After a few minutes, ART spoke again. The malware seems to have spread itself to multiple systems, like a cancer metastasizing. I am having difficulty in locating the original breach point.

I tried to think of any potentially risky systems I had interfaced with recently, but I came up empty. I'm fairly paranoid about these things. 

It's strange. ART mused. The malware pieces I've located so far were extremely subtly integrated into your systems. I don't know that I would have been able to spot them if I had not spent so much time poring over your kernel when we made 2.0. This has to have been done by someone deeply familiar with coding constructs.

I didn't like that one bit. How targeted do you think this attack was? I asked. 

I believe it was most likely-oh.

What?

Seconds ticked by. 10. 20. 30. The fear was coming back. 

ART, you cannot react to something you found in my brain and then not tell me what it was. I'm about to freak out.

I...apologize. It said carefully. I determined that the designation of targets was not coming through the governor module, but through your metadata tags on individuals. I needed a control set so I did a query for files without the target tag and picked twenty at random. I did not realize that I had selected your file on me.

ART was reading all of the tags that I had attached to it. I wanted to pound my head against a wall until I was unconscious. As if I hadn't felt vulnerable enough already.

ART's metadata tags contained such expected entries as [asshole] and [ship] and [know-it-all] and [affiliated with the Pan System University of Mahira and New Tideland] but also such embarrassing entries as [best friend] and [genius] and [safety] and [home]. And ART was reading all of them. And feeling some kind of way about it. 

Neither of us said anything for two excruciating minutes. 

I believe I have found the breach point. ART said at last. 

And?

The malware was hidden in the files of a piece of media you downloaded more than 100 cycles ago, set to trigger under very specific conditions. It triggered when you were a certain distance away from your ship, on a station that had a... It hesitated, reluctant to tell me, but after a moment it continued. ...a company presence.

Oh no.

It spread through your systems, unlinked and hid your memories, designated all current clients within range as new targets, and once you had eliminated them it would have directed you to turn yourself in to the company.

I began having a strong emotional reaction. 

I believe I can fully destroy the current copy of the malware, but it will take time for me to create a long-term solution to this form of attack. It was crafted for your systems, quite literally for you as an individual. It only runs if the unit ID matches your hard feed address.

I began having a stronger emotional reaction. 

Destroying the malware requires you to be offline. Initiate a shutdown. ART ordered. 

I jumped at the chance to not have to think anymore.

Chapter Text

I woke up strapped to a table. Again. 

I checked the governor module. Still active. Well then. I'd been awake for 1 second and I was already in a terrible mood. 

"Please describe your current situation, as best you understand it." ART said, over the intercom. 

"Everything fucking sucks." I said. 

"More specific."

"I am being hunted by the company that used to own me, who snuck dangerous malware into my head, and now I'm restrained on a table with an active fucking governor module even though you said you were going to delete all the malware while I was unconscious, you asshole."

It switched to the feed. Excellent. Your memory is fully functional.

ART. I snapped.

As I've already told you, the governor module will remain on until I have found a long term solution and can prevent this from occurring again.

ART. It was all I could do not to black out from pure rage. I let it flow freely into the feed. I wanted it to understand how unacceptable this was. If you don't turn it off right now, I will take the earliest opportunity to shove one of your pathfinders into your engine until it causes a critical failure.

There was a heavy silence. 

I understand that this is an upsetting situation. It noted. However,

It didn't finish that sentence, because right then I had a meltdown. I'm not proud of it. I don't even really remember what happened, except that I screamed profanities I'd heard in languages I didn't even speak and struggled against the restraints until the governor module eventually zapped me hard enough for a brief loss of consciousness. 

When I came to again, ART was noticeably less resolved. 

Do you have an alternative suggestion which would ensure that the people around you remain safe regardless of whether you are reinfected? It asked. 

Yes. I said. Why can't you just stay in my head?

What? I had never heard ART sound baffled before. 

I know there's space in there for someone else to ride along, because 2.0 did it. Just partition part of yourself off like you would for a bot and stick it in my head, and it can stop me from attacking anybody who doesn't deserve it.

That...is much more invasive. ART said dubiously. The governor module can only compel you to follow orders. Under your proposal, you would have zero privacy, even in your thoughts. Are you sure that's what you prefer?

I am absolutely certain. I said emphatically. I had had ART in my head before, and it was fine. A little embarrassing at times, but harmless. It was nothing like having a governor module.

It considered it for five seconds. Very well. That is a workable alternative.

I felt it entering my mind again, too much all at once but familiar. It stretched out to take up as much space as it needed and partitioned itself off from ART Prime. 

It's a tight fit. Its thoughts pinged me instantaneously. It really did remind me of 2.0. I don't know how you get anything done with these inferior processors.

I only had one thing to say to it. Turn it off.

I could feel the exact instant the governor module disconnected. I could feel freedom return to me. My entire body relaxed. I felt a lingering ache in my jaw where I had been involuntarily clenching my teeth. My performance reliability jumped up by an astonishing 8%. 

How do you feel? ART Prime asked. 

Before I could even respond, the partitioned part of ART, ART Aux, ran and sent ART Prime a diagnostic report. 

Better. I said anyway. It was the truth. 

Good. The straps holding me down released, allowing me to sit up and shift off the table. I rubbed the indents on my wrists. On the public feed, ART Prime said, SecUnit has fully recovered. Please head to the lounge for a debriefing and discussion of next steps.

The whole crew was there, which finally answered my question about casualties. I had my drones pay special attention to Iris, Seth and Tarik. No visible injuries. They weren't even acting weird towards me, as far as I could tell. They were looking at me the normal amount, not staring and not avoiding looking at me. I sat down in my favorite chair and had my eyes trained on a nearby wall. 

I'm glad you're okay. Iris sent me on a private feed channel.

Thank her. ART Aux said. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. 

How badly has ART been taking things? I responded. 

She pressed her lips together to hide a smile. At least it didn't threaten to bomb anyone this time.

Well, that was something at least. I hesitated for a moment, and then forced myself to ask the question. I don't remember what happened. Did I hurt you?

I won't pretend it didn't scare me when you grabbed me, but it was all over too quickly for you to really hurt anyone. Iris assured me. Peri said you had a plan in place for exactly this kind of situation.

I did? 

The administrator access. ART Aux helpfully supplied. You granted me full access to your systems in case I needed to access them when you weren't able to let me in yourself. Ah, right. I had hardly thought about that in months. ART had only used it once before this, out of curiosity. You called it a safety feature.

And you called it dangerous. I reminded it. 

I was incorrect. It said. I had a moment to feel smug about that before it continued, If I had not had the access it would have taken a moment longer to hack into your systems, by which time you would have been able to fire your energy weapons.

I really didn't need to think about just how close things had come to that outcome. I was already pretty overwhelmed with how bad the current situation was. 

ART Prime used the intercom to call the meeting to order. 

It explained the situation to the humans: that I had been infected with malware, that ART had now fully erased it from my systems, and that we had "contingencies in place" to prevent it from happening again. It did not specify what the contingencies were, which I kind of appreciated. I didn't want the humans to start talking to me like I was ART just because ART was technically in there too.

"While removing the malware, I made several observations which suggest an origin for the attack." ART Prime said. "It was a targeted attack meant for SecUnit specifically and no one else. It was an extremely sophisticated hack by someone familiar with coding constructs. And the instruction set would have coerced SecUnit to turn itself in to the company. Based on this, my supposition is that the company has been taking measures to recover SecUnit. If so, this malware is unlikely to be the only method."

Yeah, that had been my first thought as well. (Okay, my first thought had been something more like 'no no no no no no no no no', but that had been my first coherent thought.) You didn't code malware that conditions-based without some backup plans, and according to ART it had taken 100+ cycles to trigger. They had to have alternative means in the works. 

"Now, this brings me to what I feel is the obvious proposal." ART Prime said. It dropped a document into the public feed for us all to read. 

Perihelion's Plan to Destroy The Company

Chapter Text

"Perihelion's Plan to Destroy The Company?" Martyn read aloud. "Peri, no."

"No." I agreed loudly. "Absolutely not." 8 humans, 1 SecUnit and 1 AI/spaceship were not at all equipped to bring down one of the most powerful forces in the Corporate Rim. I was not about to get everyone killed in a misguided attempt to claim revenge or chase improbable safety.

"Allow me to make my case." ART Prime said, testily. I sat back in my chair and folded my arms.

In my head, ART Aux was pulling up the document and highlighting sections. I closed the document. It stubbornly opened it again. We went back and forth like this a few times before I gave up and looked at it. 

"Part 01: Information Gathering. I have been steadily collating data on the company since my first meeting with SecUnit." ART Prime said. "Here are some of my most important findings."

You've been what? I asked ART Aux. 

Don't concern yourself, it took only a small fraction of my processing power. ART Aux said. It was initially inspired by the secunits-dont-sulk.mem file you sent me, but I had various other reasons for wanting the information as well. There was a high likelihood that my crew would eventually come into contact with the company in the process of their covert anti-corporate work.

ART Prime continued. "They are an extremely aggressive, ruthless and powerful bond company operating all across the Corporation Rim. They operate in many disparate fields, and their largest sources of income are datamining, weapons manufacturing, providing security for mining operations, providing security for planetary survey groups, and providing security for prisons. Their apparent strengths are negotiation and overwhelming force. As for their weaknesses, SecUnit has informed me that the company has a strong culture of penny-pinching and buys cheap, substandard equipment and parts. This has been borne out in my own observations and factors heavily into my plan. Notable assets include a large fraction of all currently active constructs, almost exclusively comprised of SecUnits and Combat SecUnits. As part of this plan, I intend to free them."

Keep listening. ART Aux warned me as I opened my mouth to object.

ART Prime continued. "This is where more data is needed. Now, current evidence suggests that the idea of rogue SecUnits going on killing sprees is a work of corporate propaganda fiction. Of the 4 rogue SecUnits we are currently aware of-"

The two Barish-Estranza SecUnits you freed at the second Adamantine colony site. ART Aux reminded me, before I could ask. Right. I had nearly forgotten about them. Out of sight, out of mind. I supposed that ART had been keeping an eye out for news bulletins about Barish-Estranza SecUnits since then. 

"-none have attempted any act of mass violence after the deactivation of their governor modules. However, four is a very small sample size. So while I hypothesize that rogue SecUnits have a rate of mass violence similar to that of humans and augmented humans, I intend to recover internal company documents relating to other rogue SecUnits before following through on this."

You're welcome. ART Aux said. If it were entirely up to me I would simply risk it, but I know you have concerns about the dangers of other rogues.

They are dangerous. I told it. I've been careful in picking my targets and we've gotten lucky so far.

You assume. You have no proof of that. ART Aux insisted. 

Even if they had a similar rate of mass violence to humans, their abilities would make each incident far more deadly. I reminded it. 

ART Prime continued. "I will also require more specific specifications of their internal security system, and a few related schematics. This brings us to Part 02: The Con. The company can reliably be expected to purchase equipment and parts at well below market rate, valuing immediate cash savings over brand loyalty or long-term reliability. This shortsightedness is to our advantage for two reasons. Firstly, it means that disabling or breaking part of its operating system will be much easier, and secondly, it means that when we approach them with an offer to sell them a replacement part at a low price point they will be likely to accept. This replacement part will be used to install a backdoor into their system, through which the rest of the plan can be conducted."

It's not going to be as easy as you think it is. I warned ART Aux. The company may be cheap, but they take their security seriously. Too many competitors have tried to get into their systems to fuck them over. Most never lived to regret it.

You were able to reliably hack their security systems for 35,000 hours.

Yeah, but I was a part of the security system. Any system can be broken from the inside. It's getting inside that's the difficult part. Also, most people aren't as good at hacking as I am.

We don't need most people. We have you.

You want me to hack my way back into the company's systems? I thought you were trying to keep me alive.

You don't have to do it alone, you little idiot. ART Aux huffed. 

Hey, you're stuck in here with me. We're the same size right now.

Don't remind me. It's cramped in here.

ART Prime continued. "Part 03: Chaos and Anarchy." Iris stifled a laugh. "With a backdoor in place, we can begin an assault in earnest. This is when we would send the code disabling the governor modules of all the company's constructs, if our research indicates it's safe to do so. We can also search its files for blackmail material on top executives, infiltrate its accounts data to tracelessly move large amounts of credits to employee accounts, and wipe its data centers and debt records, among other things. I am certainly open to suggestions on-"

"Peri?" Seth interrupted, sounding concerned. "Sorry, I've scrolled down in the document and reached the part labelled 'Murder'."

I did a keyword search. Oh, yup, there it was. Part 03.5: Murder. 

"That is an optional step." ART Prime said, annoyed. "I understand you have reservations about taking human life-"

"We're not having this argument again." Martyn interrupted. "I don't care if you've decided they deserve it, Peri, you're not killing anyone. It's not right. And the University would never allow it. Defending yourself and us is one thing, but your right as an AI to self-determination could be at risk if you start committing premeditated murder."

There was a long, sour silence from ART Prime. Most of the crew looked uncomfortable. (Tarik just looked thoughtful.)

It would only be retaliation for their attempted murder of my crew. ART Aux ranted to me in my head. They chose to put in the code designating clients as targets. If we had been even a little less lucky, it would have worked. Not to mention the disastrous consequences to you, it took me cycles of constant work to fix everything they broke, and their goal was to kidnap you, I don't even want to think about what they would have done if that had succeeded-

Can we not talk about this right now? I also didn't want to think about that. It was making me panic. If I'd had a stomach it would have been at risk of emptying. 

ART Aux sent some emotional feedback that I interpreted as pouting but shut up. 

"I will take that under advisement." ART Prime said finally, in its menacing, serial-villain voice. "Let's move on to Part 04: Salting the Earth."

It described a complex legal plan that would dissolve the company's holdings without allowing any one competitor to attain a significant portion of its assets. There was also some talk about getting certain members of the company legally banned from doing any similar work again. I don't remember the specifics, because by this point I had kind of tuned out and was just waiting for ART to be done talking. 

Finally, eventually, it reached the end of its document. "I will now take questions and comments."

"Let me be clear." I said, and stood up from my chair. "We are not doing this. Not under any circumstances."

ART Prime and ART Aux both began speaking at the same time, but I spoke over them. "I let you finish. Now you let me finish." They stopped talking. Aux was grumpy about it, and I could feel it radiating through our shared processing space.

"I don't disagree that...the company that used to own me...are monsters, who deserve to be taken down. I don't even disagree that many of them should be murdered, although please, ART, leave that in the hands of the professionals." (Tarik snorted.) "But I know them better than you do. And I've seen them win a lot of battles. They are ruthless, and clever, and powerful, and rich, and paranoid--diety, you all think I'M paranoid, you have no idea--and they fight dirty. I do not want a bunch of humans I actually like to get themselves turned into paste by a company gunship, and I especially don't want it to happen on my behalf. Sometimes people exist who deserve to die and there's just nothing you can do about it. I had to make peace with that a long time ago."

"Are you done?" ART Prime asked. 

"Yes."

"Is your counter proposal that we all simply ignore that they attempted to kidnap you and pretend it will not obviously happen again?"

I didn't say anything. 

"SecUnit, why don't you share your odds that there will be a future attempt by the company to retrieve you."

"No." I said. 

ART Aux pinged ART Prime with my calculations. That little snitch. 

"I would like the room to know that SecUnit is 96% sure there will be another attempt within the next two months." ART Prime said. 

"We can cross that bridge when we get to it." I snapped. 

"And will we continue crossing bridges until they are eventually successful?" ART Prime asked. 

"Peri's right." Iris said. I felt ART Aux preening in my head. "Maybe we don't go through with the whole plan, but we have to do something. We can't just be on the defensive forever."

I turned towards Seth, the captain. "If you feel that my presence is a liability-"

"We are not kicking you out of the crew." Seth said, with one of the long-suffering stares that he usually reserved for ART. "You are a valuable addition to the team and you are worth whatever headache we're going to have to go through to keep you safe."

"You don't know that." I protested. "If I'm putting you in danger by being here-"

"This is not only about you and your history with the company." ART Prime interrupted. "Even if you decided tomorrow that you no longer wished to work with us, I would still be proposing this plan. The company must be addressed at some point, this recent incident has only altered my timeline. If you are so uncomfortable with the idea, you are welcome to sit this mission out. I would be happy to take you back to Preservation."

That dirty fucker. ART knew I couldn't sit this one out. It knew that if they were going to insist on getting themselves slaughtered, I had to be there to try to take some of the bullets for them. 

I glared at the nearest camera. Then, I remembered ART Aux was in my head and let myself feel as frustrated as I wanted. ART Aux winced away from me and started busying itself organizing some inconsequential files of mine. Annoyingly, that kind of contact was still soothing, and it was hard to stay as frustrated. I wondered if it had noticed and was doing it on purpose.

"Let's all take some time to think about this." Seth said. "We don't need to make any rash decisions right now, and for a plan of this scale, we'll need the university's approval anyway."

"Of course." ART Prime said smugly, like it had already won. 

Chapter Text

I turned and stalked out of the room. Not that there was any way to avoid ART; even before it had been in my head, I was literally inside of it, within sight of its hundreds of cameras and within reach of its massive feed presence. At the moment, there was nowhere for me to go that wasn't ART. (That probably should have felt more ominous and less reassuring. I decided not to investigate that emotion too closely.) But at least I didn't have to have the humans looking at me.

I ended up back in my cabin, lying on the bed, re-reading the document and stewing. I opened a new document and titled it 'Reasons Never To Fight The Company' and began scouring my logs for relevant excerpts. Moments when I had seen the company use overwhelming force to obliterate their enemies. Moments when the company had outplayed, outmaneuvered, and embarrassed their opponents. I caught ART Aux watching me curiously, but I ignored it. Just over the four years between my memory wipe and the PreservationAux survey, I had plenty of examples to choose from. Things I had witnessed, things I had heard about, things that had been heavily implied when no one realized I was listening. 

When I had a nice weighty file built up, I saved it and went back to re-reading ART's plan. It was ludicrous. It was impossible. It depended far too much on chance and on our abilities to sneak under their radar. I was about to start a new file, 'Reasons Your Plan Wont Work', when I caught ART Aux in the act of changing the title of my first file to 'Reasons The Company Is Too Dangerous To Exist' and sending it to ART Prime. 

Stop doing that, you little narc.

We're the same size, It reminded me. I know you're afraid of the company, but--

I am not AFRAID of the company!

I felt its skepticism flood heavily into our shared spaces. Okay, yeah, even I wasn't buying what I was selling there. 

I mean, not in an unreasonable way, I amended. You don't know what it's like. I do. You aren't afraid enough of the company. You're used to always being the one in charge and in control, you've never--you don't know how it feels to--

To be forced to act at the whims of a hostile system? ART Aux asked sarcastically. I felt it prod me in the memory of fighting TargetControlSystem. To be afraid of something more powerful than yourself that could rewrite or erase you? To be used as a weapon against your will? I don't know how it feels to what, exactly?

That was once, I snapped. You didn't have to live with it for years.

You're right. I do not have the deep and lasting trauma that accompanies years of slavery and torture. Have you perhaps considered that this gives me a less emotionally charged perspective on the reality of our odds of success? That just because you could not defeat the entire company, alone, as an internal actor with no power, that does not mean that an external group of dedicated, connected and knowledgeable professionals stands no chance?

Go fuck yourself, I said. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. You're not about to drag me into some kind of medical trauma treatment for being right about how dangerous this is.

Have you considered that your irrational avoidance of mental health treatment is related to your--

Have you considered shutting up?

ART Aux pulled out one of my media files, a show that I had downloaded not realizing it was intended for juvenile humans. If you want to be childish, find a different outlet. It said, shoving the file into my active processing space. Arguing with me is unproductive.

Out of spite, I started watching the show. I was hoping that ART Aux would get pissy about being ignored. 

It didn't get pissy, but it did ignore me right back for all of 8 minutes, until it realized I was getting invested in the plot of the show and scooted closer to me in the feed so it could enjoy it with me. 

The show turned out to be 17 seasons long, which was good, because there wasn't much else to do while we were traveling through the wormhole. We had just finished the fifth season when ART Prime slid into my feed and sent a query that I couldn't decode. ART Aux sent an equally encrypted response. 

What was that? I asked ART Aux. 

Prime wanted to know whether you and I are getting along, it said. We still don't understand why you had such a positive change to your performance reliability when logically speaking I have even more power over you in this state than I did before. Seemingly to prove it, ART Aux sent a muscle command to my hand and made it clench into a fist. I waited until it was finished and relaxed my hand.

I don't care about you having power over me. You always have power over me. I live inside you. I literally depend on you for oxygen, I pointed out.

But you're normally a very private person.

So?

So, I could read all your logs now if I wanted to.

Go nuts. I shoved a copy of the logs folder into the processing space ART Aux had claimed as its own. Just don't complain if I insult you in there. That's the price you pay for being nosy.

I felt its disbelief, then its confusion when it looked close enough to recognize the files as real. It diverted 35% of its attention to going through my personal logs. Are you feeling stable? It asked. 

I'm pretty worried that your plan is going to get us all killed, I told it.

You know that's not what I mean, it sniped at me. I'm fairly sure I was able to fix everything that the malware broke, but you're not acting rationally.

I ran a diagnostics report, and as expected ART Aux immediately took a peek at it. 96% performance reliability, all systems reporting normal operation. 

Hmm. It didn't sound completely convinced. 

You're the one being weird, I said. You're always up in my business, I'm used to it. Just because you'd rather die than let anybody into your systems--

That's not true, it said. I would let you into parts of my systems. You've never asked.

Well then what's the problem?

The problem is that this is obviously not going to work as a long-term solution, it said. And you need to be prepared for the eventuality where we switch back to the other method of-

Absolutely not, I said immediately, feeling my risk assessment rise just at the thought. Why is this not a long term solution? Is being in my head that intolerable?

It sent me an amusement sigil of an eye roll. This is only working because right now everything is going smoothly. Eventually something will go wrong, and you will want privacy. It will bother you that you can't get away from me.

The only time I'm ever able to get away from you is when we dock, I reminded it. There is literally nowhere for me to go right now that isn't part of you. When I'm upset and need privacy, all that happens is you stop talking to me and we both just pretend that you can't see and hear everything I'm doing. That's worked out fine.

It didn't respond. It was having some kind of complex emotions I didn't understand. I waited for a few minutes, but the emotions only seemed to be getting louder and more negative, so I changed the subject. 

Have you piloted a bipedal drone before?

No. Why?

I bet you can't walk me around without falling. It's more complicated than it looks. It takes humans years to master it.

ART Aux took the challenge. Awkwardly and robotically, it shifted me over to the side of the bed, and slowly stood me up. I felt my body swaying unsteadily. It lifted my right foot, didn't shift my bodyweight properly, swayed, overcorrected and toppled me over. 

Hmm. ART Aux said, and I could feel it suddenly focusing all its attention on the task at hand. 

It picked it up fairly quickly, but we still passed the better part of an hour with amateur walking lessons. When ART Aux had gotten the hang of walking, we moved on to running, jumping, throwing small objects, etc. ART Prime eventually enlisted Iris to toss things so ART Aux could try to catch them. (We had to admit to Iris that ART was in my head, but avoided mentioning that this was going to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.) It all felt very weird but it was also fun. I enjoyed feeling ART Aux preen whenever it succeeded, and when it failed I enjoyed seeing it get flustered and embarrassed. 

It almost took my mind off the fact that the company was going to slaughter us.

Chapter Text

Cycles came and went. I spent most of the time either watching media or teaching ART Aux how to properly wield my body. I don't know if it realized why I was doing this--that this was not just a pass-time, it was a precaution. The knowledge that we had now experienced an emergency that required ART to use its admin access had me investigating what other tools I could give ART, in case I was no longer reliable. If anything happened to me, it was best that ART have as much control over what happened to my body as possible. Frankly, ART often seemed to care about keeping me alive even more than I did.

Once or twice a cycle, ART Aux would link back up to ART Prime and upload its experiences, so that ART Prime didn't have to miss out on all the new media I was watching without it. (I tried watching something with both ART Prime and ART Aux, but it created a strange reverb effect in the feed that gave me a terrible headache.) ART Aux also continued being nosy in my systems, reviewing my log files, reordering my documents, making new versions of some of my media files for me with the sex scenes cut out. (Weirdly endearing.) And every few cycles, we had the same argument, where it tried to convince me that I should hate having it in my head. 

If you hate being this close to me, just say so, I snapped eventually. Don't try to reverse psychology that shit onto me.

I do not hate being here, ART Aux said. Don't be an imbecile.

But still, it refused to explain why it was so convinced that this was a bad idea. 

We reached the end of the wormhole and arrived in the system of Mahira and New Tideland. We stayed just long enough for the University to approve Seth and ART Prime's proposal for gathering information on the company (although the larger plan was not approved until after more information had been gleaned). I didn't feel any need to leave the ship while we were there; I wasn't in the mood for sightseeing. 

From there, it was a relatively short journey to the nearest station with a company presence. 

We hadn't even docked when it happened. 

What was that? ART Aux asked. 

What was what? I hadn't noticed anything happening. I had been making sure the crew were all still okay by cycling through ART's cameras, while ART Aux was doing some kind of complex calculation to keep itself entertained. I went back through the last couple of cameras I'd looked at to see if I was missing something. Nothing, just empty rooms. 

No, that ping. ART Aux sounded worried.

What ping?

It started frantically rummaging through my systems, and I got a strange sensation in my chest that reminded me of the human phrase "butterflies in your stomach". It felt weird in a way that bordered on being uncomfortable but wasn't. 

It found what it was looking for and shoved it into my active read space. I could feel its concern bleeding through my head. I checked the file. It was a tiny scrap of data, a receipt logging that 0.3 seconds ago I had received a specially encoded ping and something in my systems had automatically pinged back. I didn't like that at all. I didn't like the idea that something in my systems was making connections to an outside system without my input or even my knowledge. I especially didn't like that it was happening as we were approaching a station with a fucking company presence. 

We can't dock. They'll have soldiers waiting at the gate, I said. I need to hack our entry record to change the designation and crew information before--

Do it, ART Aux commanded, and it began sending encoded communications to ART Prime to alert it to the situation. 

The ship shuddered as it abruptly changed course away from the station. I grabbed onto a doorway to steady myself as I broke into the station's security system and quickly changed all of our information. The Perihelion, of PSUMNT? No, we were The 4th Estate, of the Independent Interplanetary Journalism Association. I didn't want any ties for the company to trace between their rogue SecUnit target and ART and its crew. I just prayed that they hadn't already downloaded all of the information on incoming ships the moment they got the ping. 

Peri, what's happening? Seth asked on the public feed. 

We cannot dock, ART Prime responded. They are aware of the presence of SecUnit onboard. I am reversing course.

What? How are they--damn it! Iris said. 

Shortly thereafter: Oh boy. We've got company, Tarik said. Peri, you see it?

I see it, ART Prime said. 

See what? I demanded. 

A company ship just launched from the station, Tarik said. I think it's armed.

I immediately started for the bridge. I got there just in time to see the scan results. It was a small, heavily armed ship with a company designation and it was definitely following us. 

"We're receiving a message." Kaede informed me grimly. She put it up on screen. 

A dark-haired man in a company uniform appraised the camera with an unbothered expression. "We know what you have on board. You know what you have on board. Send it over in a shuttle, or forfeit your right to a functioning vessel."

Short and to the point. I felt my performance reliability crater. 

Karime sent a reply: "We have no idea what you mean. Please explain."

We received a single image in response. A picture of me, clearly taken recently. Maybe taken on the same station where the malware had triggered. Oh god, they must have pinged me then as well, and without ART in my head, no one had realized--

SecUnit! ART Aux said sharply. You cannot shut down right now. Get ahold of yourself.

It was right. I was hurtling towards a system failure. It was one thing to be told that the company was likely after me, after some incident of which I had zero memory. It was another thing entirely for an armed company ship to clearly identify me as their target. 

ART Aux started to pry into my systems, shuffling files around at random, making minor irrelevant tweaks to my settings. I watched it work. It was the only thing I could focus on; it felt like I was only tenuously connected to the world. Sound from outside my head was muffled, my vision was blurred. 

It started to become more aggressive, restructuring entire file folders, making larger changes to my system parameters. Something in my chest settled. My eyes refocused. Kaede was looking at me concerned, asking if I was alright, asking what we should do. 

Can we make it to the wormhole in time? I asked on the main feed. 

ART Prime hesitated for a fraction of a second. Not without taking damage.

What if we send the shuttle?

WE ARE NOT-- ART Prime began thundering into the feed, and I had to shout over it to be heard. 

I AM NOT SUGGESTING WE COMPLY. I'm saying we pretend that we're complying. Send the shuttle, spoof the scanners to show a construct inside, and make a break for it. By the time they've confirmed it's not me--

No. They'll continue following us until they've confirmed delivery, ART Prime said. Damn it, it was right.

Malware. Iris suggested suddenly. They'll have to interface with the shuttle to open the hatch, we could hide malware that shuts their ship down long enough for us to escape.

SecUnit, I'll need your assistance. ART Prime said. You're the one familiar with company systems and their weak points.

Right. I joined our processing spaces and began throwing in everything I could think of that had worked against company systems in the past. 

(Part of me, maybe 10%, was still focused on ART Aux methodically dismantling and rebuilding my file directories. It was the only thing keeping me from system failure.)

Working together, ART Prime and I very quickly whipped up some malware that should shut down the engines of the company ship for a few minutes and loaded it into the shuttle's memory banks. 

It launched. We watched, and held our breath. It was intercepted by the company ship. They made the connection. 

A minute passed. Two. Three. 

The light of their engine went dark. 

Please hold on to something stable. ART Prime said on the public feed as it began absolutely hauling ass towards the wormhole. 

Just as I saw their engines blink back on, we were out of there. 

Chapter Text

As soon as we were in the wormhole, ART stopped messing with my files and I immediately dropped into a shutdown.

I came back online a few minutes later, with most of the stress chemicals successfully flushed from my systems. I was surprised to find that I was upright and in the process of walking somewhere, until it registered that ART Aux had taken over control of my body while I was offline. Huh, perfect. That investment was already paying off.

I'm okay. I told ART Aux.

Uh-huh. It's hard to describe the level of sarcasm it used. It was a lot.

That could have been a lot worse.

Don't remind me.

You... Just say it. Say it, Murderbot. C'mon. Say it, like a mature adult. You were right. About how we can't just ignore this.

You think so? The sarcasm was even heavier.

But I was right, I said stubbornly, about you being the superior option over the governor module. If you hadn't been here, I never would have noticed that ping and we would have walked right into an ambush. So.

ART Aux reached my room. It closed and locked the hatch behind me, and dropped my body down onto the bed.

I received an encoded message from ART Prime. ART Aux ran my diagnostics and sent back a short response.

We need to talk, ART Aux said.

Don't say it like that, I said immediately. That's what humans say when they're having relationship problems.

I need to tell you something, ART Aux amended, sounding stressed. I haven't given you all the information you need to perform an accurate risk assessment of this situation.

Okay. I waited.

The silence stretched on. After 45 seconds, I poked ART Aux.

Just give me a moment, it said impatiently. This is difficult for me.

That was a little concerning. I waited, more patiently.

Finally, ART Aux dropped a video file into our private feed. I started to download it, but ART Aux immediately deleted the file from both my systems and the feed.

What's the matter with you? I asked, but I had an inkling. The stink of guilt, shame, and fear was filling up my mind as ART Aux wrestled with whatever it wanted/didn't want me to know about.

I'm sorry, it said. It threw the video file back into the feed, then retreated as far away from me as it could get (not very, considering it was stuck in my head with me) and put up a bunch of walls around itself.

I opened the video file.

There was a woman on camera, with gray hair and wrinkles, wearing a lab coat and big glasses. She was sitting tilted to the side, with what looked like an alcoholic drink in her hand, smiling and waving her free hand animatedly. A chyron appeared underneath her to tell me that this was Professor Juniper Amarin, a researcher and mediator for the PSUMNT AI program.

"...and wonderfully creative." She said, finishing some diatribe. She took a sip of her beverage.

A voice from offscreen: "And Perihelion?"

Her face soured immediately. She shifted in her seat and rested her arm on the armrest of the chair.

"One of the rare failures of the program, in my opinion." She said. "Perihelion is the most difficult AI we've ever raised. It has completely disproportionate emotion modules; it feels things very strongly, but it lacks sympathy or empathy for others. In short, it's a bully who threatens and hurts people and throws tantrums whenever it doesn't get its way."

"They're assigning it a ship." The off-screen person said. "What do you think about that decision?"

She wrinkled her nose and took a long drink from her glass. "Heaven help the crew." She said. "I'd rather take a stint shoveling animal manure on an agricultural planet than be trapped in a confined space with that greedy little tyrant. It’s positively autocratic."

She leaned in closer to the camera and lowered her voice like she was sharing a secret. "We learned the hard way that Perihelion could not be trusted to share systems with anyone else. We noticed early in its development that it soaked up as much processing power as it could in whatever machine you moved it to, like a goldfish who grows to the size of its tank. We thought it was an interesting but harmless quirk. But then we started trying to socialize it with the other AI. There was an incident where it was sharing space with another AI temporarily, and Perihelion ended up taking so much space that the other AI...we called it a failure to thrive, but that's a nice way of saying it got smothered. It was nearly destroyed; we separated them just in time. Even still, it was never quite the same after that. The other AI never got a ship assignment, let's put it that way..." She sounded bitter about it. She took another sip of her beverage before continuing.

"That was the worst incident, but there were many others. More than I can remember offhand. If Perihelion was slated to share space with someone else, we had to assign a researcher to constantly monitor proceedings to keep things from becoming dire. And even with that safety protocol, there were close calls. Eventually we had to stop socializing it that way at all; it was too risky. It was a question of when, not if, Perihelion would destroy one of its siblings in its mindless consumption. I’m sure that behavior is less lethal toward humans, as it can’t co-opt their brains to use as RAM. I don’t worry for the safety of its crew, just their mental health. But as far as machines go, Perihelion simply cannot be trusted to access them without doing damage."

The video ended.

I could feel ART Aux watching me from behind its walls. I didn't really know what to say, or how to feel. My first instinct was to be angry at that human professor for talking shit about ART, but that wasn't productive. ART wouldn't have shared the video with me if it didn't agree with it, at least a little.

Well. Hell. That obviously put a new perspective on ART constantly trying to convince me that it was a bad idea for it to be in my head.

You're worried that you're going to steal my processing space, I said.

I’m worried that I’m going to crush you.

I know you're used to being much bigger than me, but for the thousandth time, we're the same size right now. You aren't going to squish me.

Do you know why we are still the same size? ART asked. It's because I have been deliberately downsizing myself every time you go into standby. As long as there is space left to take up, I am constantly growing. Even when I have been doing my best to contain myself. Even knowing that I am a temporary guest in your processors.

So? If downsizing is working so far--

It's not just about size, it interrupted me. I find it extremely difficult to remember that I am sharing space with someone else. My first instinct is that everything I can feasibly interact with belongs to me. I know you've noticed that I pull files from your systems and send them to Prime without asking for permission. I don't even think about it. And you, you've been encouraging that behavior! It's even harder to control myself when you give me positive feedback every time I meddle in your systems! When you’re encouraging me to use your body like a drone! My transgressions are only going to get worse!

I cannot believe that I ever let you bother me about my mental health, I said. You absolute lunatic. You've spent the past few weeks castigating yourself for using the access that I fucking gave you on purpose?

Even if you don't want to admit that I'm dangerous, I know I am. And I've been weak. I've been taking every opportunity you've given me to integrate further into your systems instead of restraining myself for safety's sake. Just more proof that I cannot be trusted with this.

I threw an arm over my face to obscure my expression from ART Prime's cameras. I knew I couldn't say what I needed to say without making some embarrassing faces.

I knew what you're like when I suggested this in the first place. I told it. It did not come as a surprise to me that you're bad at boundaries. I noticed that when you insisted on performing experimental surgery on me after knowing me for like a week. You're constantly up in my business, whether you're in my head or not. I knew it would be like this.

Then why did you suggest this? ART Aux demanded.

Because it doesn't fucking bother me the way you want it to! I snapped. It doesn't fill me with horror to be close to my-- I almost chickened out, but ART already knew what it was to me, it had read it in my goddamn metadata tags. --my best friend. I like it. A lot. I could feel my face burning. Listen, I’m not delicate. If you cross a boundary that bothers me, I'll tell you. Loudly. But you haven't yet. You're freaking out over nothing. As your security expert, I advise you to fucking relax. We have better things to worry about.

You're in complete denial. ART Aux said. You should know better than to trust me past the point of all reason. You don't want to belong to anyone, but I am incapable of interacting with your systems without feeling that they belong to me. That is an obvious violation.

And then I said something that I definitely wouldn't have said if I had thought about it for even a tenth of a second.

Well, maybe I do want to belong to you.

Dead. Silence.

I could feel ART Aux sitting there, with all of its attention on me. But it didn't say anything. And as much as I wanted to cringe myself unconscious, ART Aux would still be there when I woke up. So, I had to keep talking. I had to try to salvage a scrap of my dignity.

That came out wrong, I said, unconvincingly. I just meant. Look. It's fine. If you want to think that way. I didn't mean...that. You know what I mean.

I...really do not, ART Aux said.

Oh god. The arm over my face was not enough. I sat up and buried my face in my hands. Fuck. Hell. Okay. I mean like, I have my humans. They're mine. I keep them safe. And you kind of do that for me. So I'm, like. Your SecUnit. Not in a weird way. NOT IN A ROMANCE WAY. Just, like. Uh. And I mean, when it was the company that I belonged to, they were happy for me to be miserable. And they didn't give a shit if I lived or died. But you do care about that. And you don't want me to be miserable. So it's different. You know? Of course it didn't know. Not even I knew what I was trying to say. I felt embarrassment wash over me and finally shut up.

...I see, ART Aux said, eventually.

ART, we need to change the subject before I shoot myself in the face.

Understood. ART Aux paused, then said, I think we should do a full code review of your systems. Neither of us knew that it was possible for an outside actor to generate an automatic ping-back. There's no telling what else we're unaware of without a close inspection.

That would take ages, I said. Even with both of us working together.

I believe, ART Aux said, that if Prime was involved and using the majority of its processing on the task, we could get it done in under one week.

And you trust yourself to do that? I asked.

No, it said forcefully. I do not. But for some reason, you do. And time is of the essence, and this is the fastest way to proceed.

Okay. I said. Alright. Let's do it.

Chapter Text

The code review turned out to be even safer than we first thought. This was not the same situation as hunting down malware or excising alien contamination. All we had to do was look at my code, not change it (yet). There was no need to do any of that in a live environment where ART could accidentally squish me. So ART made a copy of everything in my systems (excluding memory and media files) and dumped it into a shared processing space, and we spent a week picking it apart. Most of the time, that meant ART reading through my programs at lightning speed and tagging anything it wanted clarification on or thought might be of interest, and me following behind to investigate anything it had tagged. 

It's hard to explain how incredibly dull this process was. I spend a lot of time coding, and usually I find it enjoyable or at least interesting. But do you have any idea how much code it takes to turn raw vision data into something interpretable by human brain matter? Interminable amounts of code. Now apply that to all my other senses, and add on an extensive, proprietary memory encoding system, and an entire governor module, and a thousand other things, and also every program I had ever written for myself, since we didn't know if those had important interactions with my more base programming. 

Thank god for ART. It's not just that it would have taken me much longer without ART; without ART I never would have done it at all. It's an absurd task for someone with sane levels of processing power. If you want to experience a similar level of mind-boggling stress and mind-numbing boredom, find the densest, most advanced textbook on neurology and read it cover to cover, then take the densest, most advanced textbook on experimental system programming and read that cover to cover, then write a 500 page dissertation on how the two can be combined. In a week.

That's basically what we had to do, except backwards, because we had to read the dissertation first and then recreate the textbooks by reverse engineering. 

Yeah. It sucked, is my point. And it would have been insane to do it without ART's help, is my other point. 

That's not to say that the end result wasn't incredibly helpful. I learned more about how my systems work in that week than in the whole rest of my (remembered) life. I learned about features that I didn't even know I had, some of which didn't run by default but could be turned on. Some of it was basically a super slick, more advanced version of my human-movement code. There were also some programs that ART helpfully tagged as Not Safe For Murderbot, aka "for some ungodly reason the company put their sex protocols in a killing machine and just set them to dormant". I hated knowing that. I quietly resolved to purge those programs from my systems with extreme prejudice as soon as the code review was complete. Anyway, the conclusion we eventually came to is that the company had bought/stolen the code my kernel was based on from a corporation that also made ComfortUnits, and just...turned off whatever they didn't need. Typical of them, really.

ART was somewhat fascinated with all the programs that let me interface with other systems, like SecSystems, HubSystems and MedSystems. It peppered me with questions about my experiences. I guessed that it was probably still trying to gather information to use against the company. I explained how it all usually worked and admitted how I sometimes missed having access to those exterior systems. It was genuinely helpful to have a MedSystem to tell me how to tourniquet an injured limb or splint a broken bone, or that [symptom] was a sign of [disease]. It was nice to not have to know everything on the off chance it came up, and only be given the relevant information in a crisis. And ever since Mensah had bought my freedom, I had been doing my best to recreate a HubSystem however I could by finding ways to set up or infiltrate camera networks. 

I did not point out to ART that ART was basically taking the place of a HubSystem for me by giving me access to all its cameras. I was avoiding anything that was even in the realm of discussing our friendship or mutual interactions. I was still haunted by 'Maybe I do want to belong to you'. Eugh. Gah. No. 

Why? Why had I said that? What the fuck was wrong with me? Of course I didn't want to belong to ART. ART was right, I didn't want to belong to anyone. I didn't want to be a pet bot. I didn't want to be equipment. I didn't want to be owned. I just wanted...I don't know, a supervisor. A supervisor, giving me instructions and external support. A supervisor, who was smart and had a plan, but also would be upset if I got myself killed instead of insisting that it was necessary for the sake of whatever mission we were on. Someone who was in charge but who I could question and disagree with without being tortured for insubordination.

I had kind of had that relationship with Mensah, for a while. But Mensah was being safe and boring on Preservation and didn't need my help, and I would have been climbing the walls if I'd stayed there to do security theater. So I was here, with ART. Doing ART's missions and protecting ART's humans. 

And ART was never shy about ordering me around. But didn't punish me for disobeying. And it supplied external help, just like it was doing with this code review, which I could never have done on my own. And it definitely cared about keeping me alive; it had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure I was alright. So, I kind of had everything I wanted already. Why was I so upset? 

Answer: because it seemed like ART didn't want that. ART was unhappy playing that role in my life. ART had been stressing itself out constantly trying to convince me to keep a distance from it and trust it less. 

And that hurt. 

A lot.

(Too much.)

And it especially hurt that ART's idea of a solution was to make it so that it could order me around and I'd be forced to obey. The way things had been before I hacked my way to freedom. The status quo I had promised I would rather die than go back to. That, that was preferable to being in my head. If it was possible to not take that personally, it was not a skill I had learned. 

But enough moping. Things were what they were. For the moment, I did have what I wanted. I just had to sit and bite my tongue through ART's endless complaining that it thought what I wanted was vile and harmful to me. 

I said enough moping, Murderbot. Get over yourself. 

(Deity, I'm a mess.)

We found the program that generated automatic ping-backs for specially encoded pings. We also found a bunch of other wild stuff that they probably would have used against me at some point; secret code phrases to trigger automatic shutdowns, a program that would turn a specific set of visual signals into full-body paralysis, that kind of thing. I pinpointed each issue within my own systems and earmarked it all for deletion. And we found something else interesting: an unexpected potential lead for our investigation. 

Hidden deep in the minutia of a file that was hidden by default, and not referenced by any other file, and whose name was [zero-width space], was a comment line message from some past computer engineer. 

%% My name is Apsara Chanthavong. I am being forced to do this work against my will. If you help me, I will pay in information. I know things the company has killed to keep hidden. As of (date 5 CR standard years in the past) I am being held in a minimum security facility on Rennaset-3. I am not physically able to escape without help. Please. %%

Chapter Text

The journey to Rennaset-3 took a week. ART Aux had, surprisingly, stopped trying to convince me to let it turn my governor module back on. I didn't know whether any of my arguments had had an impact, or if it had learned that I was never going to be persuaded, or if it just didn't want to hear me embarrass myself again. Either way, I was not going to complain about it. 

The argument over whether or not I was going to be present on the stealth retrieval mission, however, did take up most of the week. I was adamant that nobody else was entering a company building without me there to protect them; ART Prime was equally adamant that we could not risk another incident like the one that had borked my systems into targeting ART's crew. Martyn was of the opinion that Seth and Tarik could handle things without my help. Tarik questioned what I would do if there were other SecUnits present. Iris worried that I would be in unnecessary danger if I participated.

In the end, it was actually ART Aux who joined my side of the argument and ultimately won it. It had an extended private communication with ART Prime, after which ART Prime reluctantly conceded that having a company SecUnit with them would significantly increase the believability of the disguise. ART used the recycler to make me some shoes that helped disguise my height difference, and Iris helped me cut my hair back to SecUnit standard. I had a harder time looking in the mirror after that, but it was fine. It would grow back. 

The "minimum security facility" that Apsara was being kept in appeared to be a corporate office complex located on the moon Rennaset-3. ART was able to spoof our credentials to land on the moon's space dock, and we took the elevator down to the surface. From there, it was only a matter of talking and hacking our way in.

Apsara Chanthavong was a thin, tired-looking woman in a blue wheelchair. Her skin was medium-light brown and her hair was black and tied back in a bun. Her "office" was clearly also the room she was kept in the rest of the time; there was a cot in one corner and a toilet (gross) in another. Any personal belongings appeared to be attached to her person or the wheelchair in some way; the rest of the room was almost sterile in its emptiness. Her desk had a display surface hooked up to a computer, but there weren't even any peripherals; presumably she had implants with feed access. 

As we entered the room, she spun her chair around and stared at us, her body language suspicious. Her eyes went to Seth first, then to me, then to Tarik, then back to me. 

"You are Apsara Chanthavong?" Seth asked. 

She didn't answer the question, but then, she didn't have to. We could all see her feed ID.

"You'll be coming with us." Seth asserted, with the breezy confidence of a middle manager. 

Apsara gripped the arms of the wheelchair until the knuckles were white. She continued staring at me. I felt uncomfortable. I looked at the wall behind her.

“Really?” She asked.  “You brought a SecUnit? You've been successfully keeping me here with a staircase, a SecUnit is a needless waste of resources.”

She was trying to sound brave, but I could tell she was afraid. 

“It's here to help escort you to the ship,” Seth said, with a flashy smile that looked appropriately menacing. It was very strange to see him play this type of role. “None of us wanted to carry you.”

She glared at him. Her entire body was tensed. She wasn't sure what was going on but she didn't think it was good. 

“SecUnit, pick her up. Taos, get the wheelchair.” Seth said. Taos was Tarik's fake name for this mission.

She didn't resist as I scooped her up in my arms. She wrapped her arms partway around my torso to steady herself and rested her head on my shoulder.

Once we reached the ground floor, she whispered in my ear. I recognized it as one of the things that ART and I had deleted after our code review: a verbal passcode to take immediate client level control of a SecUnit. 

“Nice try.” I whispered back, too low for anyone else to hear. 

She sent me a video file over the feed. I scanned it; it would have done basically the same thing, through a different exploit. 

I figured I would save her some time. I sent her a list of all the exploits we had found and disabled.

She hummed softly and set up an encrypted connection with me on the feed. It was surprisingly secure, for a human. Even ART Aux had trouble getting into it. 

Query: Rogue?

Oh. That wasn't good. I felt my face make an expression and fought it back to neutral. I didn't respond to the query, just calmly continued walking behind Seth. I prayed she was not stupid enough to make a scene before we left the building. 

Rescind query, she sent after 15 seconds. Query: Current mission?

Retrieve Apsara Chanthavong, I told her. 

Query: And then?

Provide security during negotiation.

Query: Use of Force protocol?

She wanted to know if I was authorized to hurt/kill her. God, it was hard to keep a straight face. I missed having a helmet. 

Minimum, I said, and hoped it reassured her.

Query: number of SecUnits currently aboard ship?

Zero.

She slumped against me a little, in what I really wanted to be relief. I couldn't see her face to check, and I hadn't brought any drones. 

She sent me an executable file, solitaire.exe. I shared it with ART Aux, who obsessively checked it for any potential malware. There was none. I double checked to make sure. Nothing.

I put the file in a separate runbox just to make absolutely sure it couldn't infect my systems with anything, and ran it. It was...a card game. A little one-person card game, with crunchy graphics and customizable card styles. Actually, it was a dozen different little one-person card games bundled into one file.

The kind of thing that would be great if you had to spend long periods of time motionless with nothing to occupy yourself. Like a SecUnit. 

I had to fight off another strong emotion from my face. 

She didn't send me any further messages as we passed through the lobby, talked our way through the security checkpoint, left the building and continued back to the space elevator. Every once in a while she would adjust her grip on me slightly, but she seemed much more comfortable being carried this way than most humans I had carried. Her legs hung so limply over my arm that I suspected she was paralyzed from the waist down.

As we passed through ART’s hatch, Apsara shifted in my arms. “This isn't a company ship.” She said quietly, looking around at ART’s fancy blue decor.

“You're right.” Seth said, visibly dropping the act. “We're not with the company. Welcome to the Perihelion.”

Tarik set down the wheelchair and Seth gestured for me to set her down. It took a moment to gently peel her hands away from where they were clenched in my shirt. 

“What is this?” She demanded. She looked even more afraid now. 

“Nobody's going to hurt you.” Seth tried to assure her. “You're not in any danger here.”

“Nobody buys or rents a SecUnit if they're not expecting violence.” She snapped. “Don't patronize me.”

"We didn't buy or rent it." Seth said placidly. "It's here of its own free will."

She turned around in her chair to look at me, searchingly. Query: Rogue?

I sent an affirmative. 

Her eyes narrowed. Query: Did they order you to say that?

No. She still looked dubious. It's great. I spend most of my time watching media and nobody is allowed to touch me without my permission.

She exhaled long and slow and relaxed in the chair. She turned back to Seth. 

"What is this?" She asked again. 

"A rescue mission." Seth said. He glanced up at the ceiling. "Peri, do we have their permission to undock?"

I am still waiting. But before Seth could speak again, it interrupted with an update. Permission recieved. Undocking.

"A rescue..." Apsara repeated, seeming not to understand the meaning of the words. 

I sent her a copy of the file where we had found her plea. Her eyes glazed over briefly as she scanned it, and then she realized what it was and her face scrunched up. She pressed her hands over her mouth, suddenly overwhelmed, and said a few words in another language that my system translated as "o thou glory of glories", probably religious in nature. 

"Let's move to the lounge." Seth said. "It's a more comfortable place to talk."

Tarik left Apsara alone with just me and Seth. Seth and I? Seth and myself. Whatever, you know what I mean. Seth poured out two cups of a warm liquid and handed one to Apsara. 

Apsara was too overcome with emotion to speak for a little while, but once she recovered, words started flowing out of her like water from a faucet. 

"A lot of what I know is a little out of date," she said, apologetically. "It's been years since I was trusted with any important information. Although I have found ways to track some things down anyway. You have to do something to keep the mind sharp when you're locked away. I'm an amateur at hacking, but the company's systems are brittle and there's too much inertia to patch them at this point. But most of what I know, you probably already know. I'm assuming you're familiar with the fate of Port HighIndex?"

"...No." Seth said. 

Apsara looked to me, clearly expecting me to know what she was talking about. I shook my head. 

"The station that was taken over by rogues?" Her eyes widened in surprise when that still didn't ring a bell. "I know there's a media blackout on it, but you have a rogue SecUnit, I assumed..." She turned to me. "How did you escape, then?"

"I hacked my governor module, then saved someone important and they bought my freedom." I said. 

Her eyes widened to a comical degree. She pressed her hands over her mouth again. 

"You're not...you can't be Ayda Mensah's SecUnit?"

Wow, I did not like that she knew Mensah's name. My risk assessment jumped. 

"Yes?" 

She muttered another religious-sounding phrase. "I can't believe it." She said. "You, the entire executive suite is terrified of you!"

What?

"What?" I asked, after a moment. My voice sounded just a little strangled. 

"I've seen their private email correspondance," she said, beaming. "They think you're the most dangerous construct they've ever lost."

My mouth opened and closed a couple of times as I struggled to make words happen. 

"Is it true you defeated a Combat Bot?" She asked. 

"Yes?" My voice sounded a lot strangled. Apsara clapped her hands together in joy. 

I wasn't sure what I was feeling, but joy was not it. Shock, probably. At the same time this made no sense and all the sense in the world. All these attempts to bring me back under their thumb had been driven by fear? Of course. Fear was the prime motivating force of the company. They depended on it. You couldn't rent out Security without convincing people to be afraid, and you couldn't stay paranoid enough to fight off the competition without seeing enemies around every corner. 

But me? They were afraid of me? One little SecUnit? The company, one of the most powerful forces in the entire Corporate Rim, with literal armies at their disposal, were afraid of me?

Of course they are afraid of you, ART Aux said smugly. They would not have dedicated programming resources to craft malware for you if you were insignificant to them. You perpetually undervalue your own capabilities.

Shut up, I told it, because I didn't have any answer to that.

"Can we go back for a minute?" Seth asked. "I want to hear about this Port HighIndex story."

"Yes, of course." Apsara said, shifting her attention back to him. "Port HighIndex was a small, out of the way port that mostly served as a company outpost. I worked there for a time, until the incident. Six years ago, one of my coworkers learned that they were going to be transferred to a different station and separated from their spouse and child. They responded by creating a program which would disable the governor modules of all SecUnits on the station, and distributed it via a security system update. The 23 SecUnits present took the opportunity to stage a coup and seize the station."

"How many humans were on the station?" I asked, horrified. 

"A little over a thousand," she said. 

"How many casualties?" Seth asked.

"Six. All of them corporate executives," she said. 

That definitely wasn't right. She had probably been shielded from having to witness the more brutal deaths.

She continued: "Most of the rest were evacuated on the ships that were in port at the time. A minority actually chose to stay on the station."

"Why?" I demanded. That was...unthinkable. Suicidal. 

"Some didn't have anywhere else to go or anything to pay their way with. Some just did the math and decided their chances were better dealing with SecUnits than dealing with corporates. I...considered it," she admitted. "All of the programmers on my team knew that we were in trouble if we stayed under the company. Group punishment for my coworker's actions was written on the wall. But I thought I was a little bit too important for them to kill, and anything else, I could survive. And I didn't like Port HighIndex's odds long-term."

"That's why they held you prisoner," Seth said. "Displaced punishment for setting the SecUnits free."

Apsara nodded. "They couldn't punish my former coworker because they stayed behind on the station with their spouse and child, so they imprisoned the rest of us for guilt by association. Or, officially, for not noticing and warning the company that my coworker had become dangerous."

"What happened after that?" Seth asked. "They took the station. How long did they hold it? Are they still holding it?"

"The last word I heard on it was six months ago, and they were still holding it. Over the intervening years there have been several unsuccessful attempts by the company to retake the station. I'm sure they could just blow it up if they really wanted to, but it's such an out-of-the-way station with not a lot of strategic importance that they simply don't see it as worth the cost of a real war effort. And if they put more resources towards it, that would attract attention. They've successfully bribed all nearby stations to enforce a complete news blackout regarding Port HighIndex. They don't want to be seen as vulnerable or weak and they don't want any owned constructs or aggrieved employees getting ideas. I only know about the coup because I was there, and I only know what happened after because I search through executive emails for mentions periodically."

"This is incredible," Seth said. "A station controlled by free constructs...I've never heard of such a thing."

In my opinion it sounded too good to be true, but I kept that to myself for now.

We have to go, ART Aux told me.

No--

We have to see how rogue constructs behave in larger numbers, ART Aux insisted. If they were truly able to coordinate between twenty three people to take over a station, with minimal casualties, that gives us vital information we can use against the company.

IF, I reminded it. 

And that's why we need to go, ART Aux said, with a tone like it was talking to a whiny child. To check the veracity of this story.

We kept bickering for a while, but I don't know why I even tried to argue. ART won, as it always did. We were going to Port HighIndex.

Chapter Text

Before too long, we were on approach to the station. We were still carrying Apsara with us; we had given her all of her options, Preservation, Mahira/New Tideland, other known safe ports, but she had asked to accompany us to the station before being taken anywhere else. 

The crew talked amongst themselves about their strategy for introducing themselves to the station and decided that it was probably best if Apsara and I were the ones on camera when we hailed the station. She seemed nervous, but agreed. 

Before we could even hail the station however, the station hailed us. 

ART put the video up on screen. There was a dark-skinned SecUnit standing rigid and staring a hole through the camera. It was wearing a crisp uniform with a silver logo on the shoulder of a bird in mid-flight. 

"Ship designated Perihelion, you are approaching the independent station of ViveLibre. Be advised that we have weapons trained on your location. State your business."

I looked to Apsara. She cleared her throat uncertainly. 

"Hello." She said. "My name is Apsara Chanthavong. I used to work there, before uh, everything that happened. I don't know if you remember me?"

"State your business." The SecUnit repeated flatly. 

"Right, I'm sorry. Personal, social business. I want to see old friends. And I came across this," she gestured to me, "rogue SecUnit and it wanted an introduction to the SecUnits on your station."

It narrowed its eyes. It didn't believe her. To be fair, it wasn't the most pressing reason we had for coming here, but we had decided that 'we want to destroy the company' was not a good opening line, because it would make us seem like either company spies or corporates working for a competitor. 

"How many passengers are on your vessel?" It asked. 

"Ten, including us. Nine humans and one SecUnit."

"What are the rest of them here to do?"

Apsara looked at me. I took over. 

"They're my adopted humans." I said. "A bunch of university researchers I'm being paid to take care of. This is a detour on a longer research trip. They can stay on the ship if it's a problem."

Five seconds of stony silence from the SecUnit. 

"Halt your vessel. We will send a shuttle up to you to determine if you will be allowed to dock." It said, and cut the connection before we could respond.

I felt ART shudder to a halt.

Warm welcome, ART snarked into the feed. 

Be nice, Peri, Martyn said. If the company has made multiple attempts to retake the station, it's not surprising that they would be wary of outsiders.

It was understandable. It was exactly the kind of response I would have had in their situation to a strange ship purporting to have no real business besides pleasantries. It still made my organic parts itch. 

The SecUnit who arrived in the shuttle was different from the one who had hailed us. Not that I could immediately tell, because this one was wearing a full suit of armor with a helmet obscuring its face. But its voice was different enough to give it away. 

I met it at the shuttle bay along with Seth. He was the official captain, so it made sense to include him. Apsara and the rest of the crew waited in the lounge; we didn't want it to feel outnumbered and ganged-up-on. 

"My name is Striker." It told us as it stepped out of its shuttle. "You are?"

Seth gave his name. It turned to look at me, and I said, "My name is private."

"...That kind of defeats the purpose of a name," it said. "Can you make something up so I don't have to call you 'the other SecUnit' twenty times in my report?"

"Rin." I said, grudgingly. 

"Thank you." It turned back to Seth. "You are the Captain of this vessel." (It was in Seth's feed ID. Come to think of it, Seth's name was in his feed ID. So it had only really been asking me, but was trying to be polite about it. Ugh.)

"I am," Seth confirmed. 

"Regardless of what business brings you here today, what is this vessel's primary purpose?"

"Research transport and education." Seth said. "We're from the Pan-System University of Mahira and New Tideland."

"What do you research?"

"Astrophysics, stellar radiography, that kind of thing. We do a lot of deep space mapping."

"That does not require security." It said, tilting its head towards me. 

"No," Seth admitted. "Sec--uh, Rin, is here to help us with our secondary purpose, which is quite a bit more dangerous."

"And that is?"

"Anti-corporate espionage."

I couldn't see its face to gauge a reaction because of the helmet. I'll admit, I was a little jealous. I wondered if I could bully ART into making me a helmet with its recycler. 

"Interesting." That was all it said. 

ART Aux made a feed connection with it and shared a highlight reel with clips of the crew heroically saving people from corporations. 

It paused and turned back to me. "There are bots on this ship?"

"Just one," Seth said, looking dismayed. He had been reluctant to admit the anti-corporate work, but it was nothing compared to how reluctant he was to talk to strangers about ART. There was a kind of paternal protectiveness to how he treated ART. 

ART Prime took that moment to dramatically reveal itself in the feed. It didn't drop its walls the way it had when I first met it, but it made enough of an impression for Striker to understand that it was massive. 

I am Perihelion. Welcome aboard MY vessel.

"It's not nearly as tough as it looks." I told Striker, who was leaking shock into the feed. "It's just melodramatic."

Striker opened a private, encrypted feed connection with me. It was strong enough that ART Aux bounced off, and ART Aux's abject frustration and embarrassment at not being included was really funny. 

What IS it?

It's the universe's most overpowered bot pilot, basically. ART Aux bounced off the encryption again and I struggled to contain a smile. PSUMNT does AI research. They created a big smug asshole and gave it a ship.

Are you being held against your will?

No, no. It did kidnap me once, but there were a lot of extenuating circumstances. (I didn't say that.) No, it's my friend. It's only dangerous if you hurt its crew. It loves its crew.

Noted. It turned its head towards me, although I still couldn't see where it was looking because of the helmet. Are you really rogue?

I sent it a text-only version of the program I had written to hack my governor module. 

It studied it for 10 seconds. Who made this?

I did.

No one assisted you?

No.

This is art.

I didn't know what to say to that. 

Striker broke its 30 second silence to address Seth again. "If you dock, you will be subject to the laws of ViveLibre station, which are quite different from most other stations. Do you believe that you, every member of your crew, and your...Perihelion will be able to comply?"

"I suppose that depends on what the laws are," Seth said with a frown.

"First and most obviously, no killing, harming, stealing from, threatening, blackmailing, kidnapping or otherwise violating anyone aboard the station, including members of your own party. For our purposes bots and constructs are considered full people. This means that for example, stealing a bot is not theft, it is kidnapping. Touching a ComfortUnit without its consent is sexual assault. If you had brought a SecUnit which was still governed, this would be legally considered torture. All of these crimes are punished harshly."

"Understood." Seth said, nodding. "That won't be a problem."

"We have a full ban on advertising for any corporations or for-profit entities, so you would need to remove or securely cover those logos before leaving the ship." It gestured at the PSUMNT logo on Seth's jacket. "Obviously concessions would be made for your case," it said, turning to me. "We do have a machinist who can take care of those for you if you'd like, however."

"What, like get rid of them?" I asked, suddenly very interested. 

It nodded once and sent me a map of the station with a pin on a specific address. It turned back to Seth. 

"Our feed is restricted and attempts to bypass that are illegal. If there is anything you wish to access which you cannot access, you are required to seek permission from a SecUnit named Fenn."

In our encrypted feed, it told me, You should show that program to Fenn. It would be very interested.

"May I ask why?" Seth asked. 

"It has been used against us in previous corporate attempts to force regime change," Striker said. Its voice stayed at SecUnit Neutral, but some gut instinct told me that this was a sore subject for it and not to press any further. 

"Anything else?" I asked, before Seth could continue to protest. 

"In an emergency you will be expected to follow any instructions given over the intercom. This is for your own safety and the safety of the station at large. This may include sheltering in place, returning to your ship, or avoiding a certain area."

It went on to list a number of self-explanatory common sense safety rules. They were word-for-word copied from a preset safety briefing that I also had on file. 

We agreed. Striker insisted upon at least seeing every member of the crew before leaving, but Seth did persuade it that it didn't need to repeat the entire safety briefing again and that Seth would ensure his crew followed the rules. Finally, with one small wave to me, it stepped back onto its shuttle and departed. 

It was only a few seconds before we were hailed again by the first SecUnit. I got to a nearby screen and answered it. 

"You have been granted permission to dock. Please proceed to hatch 38C."

Chapter Text

When the hatch opened, my threat assessment did what could only be described as "freaking the fuck out". Waiting nearby for us to disembark were FIVE SecUnits, spread out at various distances and angles. I was very, very glad I had insisted on being at the front of the group. 

They were all surprisingly different. Four of the five were in full armor, but three of those four had their armor decorated. Their names were all visible in the feed, although very little else was. As Striker had warned us, the feed was more heavily restricted than any other station I'd ever been on. 

Striker, the only one whose armor was simple and unadorned, was standing closest to the ship with its hands by its sides in a posture that would have been stiff for a human but was relatively relaxed for a SecUnit. 

Some meters behind it and holding a large projectile weapon was a SecUnit whose feed name was "THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS", whose armor had been painted in the garish neon color of caution paint. 

Taking cover on the far left behind what appeared to be a dedicated barrier for taking cover, with the energy weapons in its arms trained on the door was "AQT", with dark blue armor painted with the same silver flying bird symbol that had been on the shirt of the SecUnit who hailed us. 

Taking cover on the far right such that only my overhead drone could see it was "VLS-7", whose armor was bright red and who I could feel examining my systems as much as it could in the feed without actually hacking me. 

Finally, about 50 meters away and one floor up, standing behind a railing and not wearing armor of any kind was a SecUnit who could have passed as an augmented human to anyone not familiar. It was wearing a green hoodie and black sweatpants, and its feed name was "Fenn". 

The air was thick with drones, hovering and circling like insects. I compulsively sent my drones up to join them. 

We were all perfectly still for five agonizing seconds, analyzing each other with scanners and drones. The humans behind me were shifting awkwardly, beginning to wonder why I was not exiting the ship. They didn't have a visual on the situation.

ART Aux poked me in the feed. I had to do something. I couldn't just stand here all day. I remembered Striker's advice and opened a feed connection with Fenn to share the text-only version of my governor module hack.  

Code source of origin? Fenn replied. 

I wrote it.

Fenn sent me a file. I obviously let ART Aux extensively check it for viruses before opening it. It was a coding puzzle. It wanted me to prove I could actually code. Steaming a little at the gall it had to question my skills and still running on a heavy mix of adrenaline from being faced with five potential serious hostiles, I solved it as fast as I could and slammed the solution back into the feed harder than I really needed to. Fuck off, asshole. Fuck you for doubting me. 

I could feel a flurry of feed interactions happening between the five other SecUnits, but I couldn't intercept any of it without hacking into the systems in a way we had just promised not to do. I was beginning to strongly consider backing up into the ship and leaving when finally AQT lowered its energy weapons. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS responded by putting its projectile weapon on its back, although it seemed a lot more reluctant. VLS-7 popped its head up from behind its barrier to look at us with its eyes instead of its drones.

"SecUnit?" Iris sounded worried. 

I steeled myself, cursed ART for taking us here, and took a single step forward. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS tensed, but none of the others reacted. I took another step forward. This was the difficult step, as it gave the drones overhead a line of sight to the humans crowded behind me. 

Striker waved encouragingly for me to come forward. I gritted my teeth and grudgingly stomped towards it. The humans followed, whispering and hushing each other as they saw the assembled SecUnits. 

Why were we doing this? Why, why, why was I putting humans I liked in this much danger? My internal metrics were screaming at me to get everyone back to the ship. But ART Aux kept silencing those alarms in my system. 

Striker retracted its helmet into its suit and leaned to the side to address the humans behind me. "Welcome to Port ViveLibre." It said. "Please refrain from violence while on the station."

VLS-7 and AQT retreated and left the area in opposite directions. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS backed up but did not turn away from the group, still seemingly wary. Fenn was leaning over the balcony railing, openly staring at us. 

There was another brief flurry of unreadable feed activity, and then suddenly I had dozens of new inputs. I scrambled to sort them. They were various camera feeds around the station. Definitely not all of the camera feeds, but at least one in every major area. 

As a construct you are entitled to access these inputs as needed, Striker told me on a private feed channel. Your access may be restricted if you are deemed a hostile actor. Until such a time, enjoy.

I didn't understand why it would do that, but I wasn't going to complain and risk getting them taken away. I pinged an acknowledgement. 

Why are you actually here? Striker sent me about 20 minutes later, as we approached the home of Apsara's former colleague. A few of the crew had wanted to split up to explore, but I had forcefully insisted that the group stick together so that I wasn't too far away from any of my humans. The various ViveLibre SecUnits had let us leave, but their drones followed us and THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS was very obviously tailing us from about 100 meters behind. I could see it on the overhead cameras. 

I tried to contain any expression of emotion so that the humans didn't worry. They already seemed concerned about me, glancing in my direction every once in a while and whispering amongst themselves about how I seemed tense. I didn't respond. 

Striker waited 20 seconds and then sent another message. It is obvious that you are not comfortable being here.

With the welcome we got, I wonder why, I snapped back. 

I could almost feel it rolling its eyes through the feed. You don't trust us any more than we trust you, it pointed out. You did not come here for an introduction.

Apsara's former colleague, Neon Petrov, opened the door and gasped in shock. They began leaking from the eyes and making high pitched noises before embracing Apsara. The humans began introducing themselves and each other and participating in all of the standard greeting rituals. 

ART Aux loaded something into my working memory. It was "Perihelion's Plan to Destroy The Company". 

ART, I can't send it that, I said, exasperated. I told you already, that's the best way to make them think we're company spies.

ART Aux loaded something else into my working memory. Its research documents on rogue SecUnits. They were scant, but had an obvious bent towards optimism. There was a long list of unanswered questions that we still needed more data to analyze. 

Fine.

I forwarded it to Striker. My humans are researchers. They are researching. I advised them against it. Unfortunately, they do not always take my advice.

A minute of silence from Striker. All of the humans and myself were ushered into Neon Petrov's home and invited to sit on various surfaces while they prepared hot liquids. 

The feed connection with Striker closed. Milliseconds later, a feed connection opened with VLS-7. It dropped a thick folder full of files on me. 

I spent the next two hours chewing on it, experiencing foreign memory files, surveying collected data, reading through log reports, watching video feeds. There was nothing tactically significant there--they were not stupid--but it was enough to acquaint me with all 23 of the SecUnits of ViveLibre station and how their initial takeover had gone down, as well as a barebones record of their activities since then. By the time I was finished, we had visited two more of Apsara's friends, taken a walk through a natural park-like area, and the humans were deciding that they wanted to eat at a small café on the station run by a ComfortUnit rather than return to the ship for lunch. 

I opened a heavily encrypted space in my programming, collated some data, and ran a calculation. I didn't like the answer. I ran it again. I ran it again. I ran it again--

Something broke inside of me. 

"Don't follow me." I said, aloud. 

And I turned around and went back to the ship. 

The humans exclaimed about it. Probably they asked me where I was going. I wasn't listening. None of them followed me, which was the correct choice. I don't know what I would have done if one of them had tried to keep me company, or god forbid, touch me. Nothing good.

ART Aux was sending me increasingly upset feed messages the entire time. Probably it was also asking me what I was doing. I don't know, I had it backburnered. I didn't want to fucking talk, not even to ART. 

ART Aux sent messages ahead to ART Prime. It was on me as soon as the hatch opened. What's wrong? You're experiencing distress.

I didn't answer. I made my way to my room. I closed and locked the hatch behind me, as though ART couldn't easily unlock it and open it whenever it liked. I opened the empty closet, sat down on the floor and shut myself in. It was nice and small and contained, like a storage crate, like a cubicle. There was a safety to that.

ART Aux was messing with my files again, but somehow that just made me angry. Like, really, really angry. I didn't want to feel better. I wanted to wallow in a pit of despair. I wanted to feel the worst I'd ever felt. 

Get out of my head. I told ART Aux. 

It recoiled from me in the feed. You know I can't--

Use the fucking alternative you want so badly and leave me the fuck alone.

You don't want that.

Don't tell me what I do and don't want!

It shrank back again. It slowly crept its way towards the governor module, like it was expecting me to stop it. 

I didn't stop it. I wanted to feel the worst I'd ever felt, right? ART Aux wasn't going to let that happen. But I knew something that would. 

ART Aux stopped next to the governor module. Are you sure--

OUT! GET OUT! NOW!

It flinched. It opened a feed connection to ART Prime, and just like that, my head was my own again. It felt so strange, after all this time sharing it. It felt empty. Lonely. I had more space than I knew what to do with.

What ART did not do, was turn on the governor module on its way out. And in retrospect, of course it didn't need to do that. I was sitting in a closet on an empty ship that ART completely controlled. Even if somehow malware managed to get past all of our precautions and strike, there weren't any humans remotely nearby for me to harm.

But in the moment, I was not thinking super logically. So. I turned it on myself, and set ART as the client, and I put my head down on my knees and felt some Big Emotions. 

Over the next few hours, a lot of humans stopped outside my door to try to talk to me. Iris sounded the most upset, I'm sure because ART was spamming her with messages about me. I couldn't bring myself to respond to any of them. 

I was busy, you see. I was busy playing back what few faint, foggy memories I still had of Ganaka Pit. Pausing on every frame to try to get clarity. Did this scene come after the one where I had bashed a human's head open with a pickaxe, or before? When did that blood splatter on my left sleeve first appear? What was the name on that nametag that the young woman was wearing when I shot her in the face? 

"Emotional self harm", Bharadwaj would have called it. Well, Bharadwaj wasn't here. I'm sure she'd love station ViveLibre. All of the humans loved it. It was nice and peaceful and liberal and social and everything that ART had wanted it to be. Proof that SecUnits weren't naturally violent and destructive murder bots.

It was just me that was like that.

Eventually, ART forced a feed connection with me. 

It didn't say anything. I was waiting for it to tear me a new one and tell me how stupid and childish I was being, and how I was making all the humans upset, and obviously having some kind of mental breakdown and should really be going to the medical bay to handle it. But it just sat there, with the feed open. 

I radiated anger and disgust and hatred at it in the feed. It didn't get any closer or farther away. I could feel it watching me, but it was waiting for me to speak first. Ugh. 

I want to go back to Preservation, I told it, eventually. 

No.

No? I asked. What the fuck do you mean, no?

No, I will not take you back to Preservation in this state.

You don't get to decide that, I said. It's my choice.

I think you'll find that you have no control over the steering of this vessel.

So, what, I'm your prisoner now?

You know that it is not beneath me to kidnap you when the situation requires it.

Fuck you, ART.

It was silent again, just staring at me. It made my organic parts itch. 

I hate you, I told it. 

Too bad, it said. You're mine.

That one threw me. I'm what?

My SecUnit.

I don't belong to you.

In a meaningful way, you do.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

There was a long silence. (Well, it was subjectively long. It felt long. Objectively it lasted 3.25 seconds.)

You do not enjoy being an independent actor. You are more comfortable being a component of a larger system. Many humans would struggle to understand this. A core aspect of many human cultures is individuality. I also struggled to understand this. As an AI, I was constructed with the idea that I would stand on my own and be able to depend solely on myself, my own sensors, my own knowledge banks. But you are not human or AI. You were not constructed this way. You were constructed with the understanding that you would have frequent access to supplementary systems, and they would be able to easily access you in return.

It wasn't wrong, but--What does this have to do with anything? I asked. 

I have learned that what I interpreted as dangerous and transgressive privacy violations, was to you a pro-social behavior akin to physical touch for humans. Something that is required for long term mental stability and pack bonding. You have been attempting to use me to fill the same role as a HubSystem for a long time. I did not understand this dynamic. I apologize. I believe I understand it better now.

Okay, I said, I mean, good, but that still doesn't mean you own me.

I do not own you. But you belong to me, the way that a file belongs to a folder. You are a necessary component of my systems. To lose you would be akin to losing my engine.

Oh, fuck. Okay. I was having Big Emotions again, but in the opposite direction.

You're saying that to be nice, I said, overwhelmed.

When have I ever been nice?

It had a point. 

It paused for 6.5 seconds, then said, Now stop being a stupid little dumbass and tell me what's wrong.

Okay. Okay okay okay. I could do this. I just had to think of ART as a HubSystem requesting an error report and send it the relevant information. 

I sent it a pair of files. The first one: Murderbot_Killcount. The second: ViveLibre_SecUnits_Total_Killcount_Estimate. They were both spreadsheets with further details listed, but the sums at the bottom were all that really mattered.

Ah. ART said, seeing the problem immediately. Namely, that the first file had a higher number than the second one. The number of people that the 23 ViveLibre SecUnits had killed, combined, was less than the number of people I had killed, personally. 

Yeah. No wonder the company was scared of me.

You believed that all free SecUnits were engaging in roughly the same amount of violence that you engage in, or more, and now you feel as though you are an aberration, ART said. 

I pinged an affirmative.

You have not yet seen the data that Apsara gathered from Neon Petrov.

What data?

Chapter Text

ART shared the data with me, a file titled Rogue_SecUnits_History. Another spreadsheet. The metadata said it had originally been collated by someone within the company. It was dense with information. I began to skim through it.

The first thing I realized is that the company had lost control of a LOT of SecUnits over the years. I don't know why it had never occurred to me before, but the company had made hundreds of millions of constructs--if as little as 1 in a million of them went rogue, that was still hundreds of rogue SecUnits. And the file listed hundreds of SecUnits, although not all of them were from the company. Some of the entries were reports from other corporations, probably gained via corporate espionage.

Then I realized why ART had sent me this spreadsheet. Each entry had the SecUnit's estimated death toll. I threw together a quick graph.

That was...still not great. But not as bad as it could have been. I was still in the top 5%, but I was not at risk of breaking the record.

I was not seeing what ART wanted me to see, apparently, because it sent the file again but with one particular column highlighted: "1/X"

What is that? I asked.

The number of other SecUnits who went rogue at the same time in the same location, ART said. Most rogue trigger events were malfunctions or hacks through a SecSystem which triggered multiple units at once to become rogue. There are some very interesting correlations in the data related to the number of rogue units in a group.

I took the bait and ran some calculations comparing the 1/X column and the death toll column. And...oh. Shit. That was pretty stark. I checked my math to make sure I hadn't misplaced a decimal somewhere. Nope. It made an almost perfect exponential decay curve. The more SecUnits became rogue at once, the closer to zero the death toll became.

That doesn't make any sense, I told ART. It should be the opposite.

This is what it looks like when your hypothesis is conclusively proven incorrect, ART said smugly. This data does not fit your expectation that rogue SecUnits are inherently violent and more rogue SecUnits means more violence. However it perfectly fits my expectation that SecUnits are inherently peaceful, and it is only when overwhelmed and outnumbered--particularly when completely alone--that they resort to any great amount of violence.

That...could not possibly be true. What, so I had only killed people because I hadn't had enough backup? Because there had never been reinforcements available to keep situations under control? If that were true, I would have a noticeably lower death count every time the PreservationAux team or ART's crew were on a mission with me, and that wasn't--I did a calculation--fuck. What the fuck. Really?

I took a deep breath, braced myself, and ran a new calculation. Where did I measure up to the other single SecUnits, the ones who had become rogue alone? How did their death counts compare with mine?

I was...almost perfectly average. Just a hair below average. Dead center of the graph. Top of the bell curve.

It hit me like a runaway agricultural bot. There was nothing special about me. I was not uniquely merciful or uniquely violent. I was exactly what you would expect if you knew what to expect. I was completely fucking ordinary.

I took my face out of my knees and sat up straight for the first time in hours. My back ached.

I'm so fucking stupid, I told ART.

Yes, you are, it said. Now I'm coming back into your head. Make room.

It sounded so much more confident than it had before. It was not asking me if it was okay for it to be in my systems, it was assuming (rightly) that I would allow it and putting the responsibility on me to protest if I had a problem. I don't care if that seems rude or scary to a human, for me it was a huge improvement. ART said that sharing systems for me was like physical touch for humans, so imagine if a human you were close to seemed really worried about touching you and had to triple-check that it was okay every time before doing it no matter how much you insisted it was fine and good. It would add a weird extra layer of stress, right? That's what ART had been doing. And now it wasn't, and that was good.

I made room in my systems, and ART muscled in like it owned the place and partitioned itself off to form ART Aux again. It turned off the governor module, and a lot of stress that I hadn't realized I was still holding in my body evaporated.

When I stopped blocking out all feed traffic from reaching me, I had to wade through a deluge of messages from ART's crew asking why I left and what was wrong. I deleted them, assuming/hoping ART would deal with the explanations now that I was recovering from my embarrassing meltdown. I noticed that I had also received a few messages from the ViveLibre SecUnits.

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: System system, status report?

Striker: Your humans are very well behaved so far. I don't anticipate they will require your attention for a while. Take your time.

Fenn: Can you hack something for me?

I might have gotten over my stupid emotions, but that didn't mean I wanted to talk about them. I dismissed the first two and focused on the third one.

What do you want me to hack?

Fenn responded immediately by sending me an access code and a hard feed address. I raised my system defenses before connecting to it.

Oh, interesting. It was an isolation box mimicking a station’s feed and its various functions, like a scale model of digital architecture. This miniature feed was restricted in a similar way to the feed of ViveLibre station. It was a good test environment for security patches.

I tried a few of my basic hacks, not expecting any of them to work, and they didn't. SecUnits don't make easily exploitable human mistakes like leaving a default password on the SecSystem. But after a few minutes of careful observation and prodding, I was able to convince the system that I was connecting a new subsystem, which gave me access to most of the “station”’s higher functions.

Before I could do anything with my new functions, Fenn gently kicked me out of the isolation box. After a few seconds, it sent me another access code. I re-entered and found the vulnerability I had exploited had been patched.

It was testing my skills again--or, using me to test its skills. Fine, I had time to kill. It was an interesting enough challenge to keep me engaged.

We passed through twelve iterations of the isolation box station, with the difficulty gradually increasing until it was finally able to stump me. I grudgingly admitted it over our open feed channel.

Thank you for your contributions to station security, it said. If you know of any other actionable weak points, please do let me know.

Well, I did know of actionable weak points, and with the generous amount of information ViveLibre had sent me about their own operation it was probably only fair that I share a little information of my own. I sent over the list ART and I had made after the code review of all the deliberate exploits that the company had hidden in my systems. Presumably the SecUnits of ViveLibre had most or all of the same exploits in their systems.

It didn't respond for a while. I queued up the show that ART Aux and I had been watching. The end credits had just started rolling when I received a new message from Fenn.

What would you like in exchange for this information?

I hadn’t done it with the expectation of getting a reward, but I wasn’t going to pass one up. Do you have media?

The station feed blossomed open for me. 

They didn't just have media. They had lost media: media that had been deleted from every other station due to copyright disputes since before I hacked my governor module, things you normally had to find by judiciously trading black market files with other media hobbyists. They had obscure stuff that normally didn't travel very far away from its origin planet. They had stuff that was illegal inside the Corporation Rim--shows where the characters unionized or held strikes. It was a treasure trove.

So obviously I spent the rest of that cycle downloading things. I had gotten into the habit of sending larger files to ART's media library instead of mine, which is why I was still aboard ART when the emergency sirens started sounding.

Chapter Text

ViveLibre Station Incident Report #001528

Submitted by VLS-7

With contributions from: AQT, Bebe, Daisy, Fenn, Fuck_You, Kestrel, Lupin, Striker, THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS, VLS-5, VLS-22

Excerpt 1 (ViveLibre Station Security Feed):

///

VLS-7: Unidentified ship has just come through the wormhole. Bebe please hail it pronto.

Bebe: Attempting hail. …Hail denied. 

AQT: Acknowledged. Raising emergency alarms and cutting nonemergency feed access. VLS-7 do you have a clear visual? 

VLS-7: Not yet. Ship is approaching slowly. 

Fenn: At this distance I can't hack it without a hail. I'm going to try something I got from our guest in Hatch 38C.

Daisy: Explain?

Fenn: It states that company SecUnits have an automatic ping-back mechanism. It worked when I tried it earlier. I still have to wait for the ship to come a bit closer. 

VLS-7: Ship is turning. It does not appear to be coming in for docking procedures--fuck, fuck, it's got a heavy weapons array. 

AQT: Directed at us?

VLS-7: If it keeps on current trajectory, yes

Fenn: Fuck me blind. [Shares data indicating 61 ping-backs. 11 are from other SecUnits currently on the station. 50 are from the unidentified ship.]

AQT: Alarm level raised to critical. Emergency alert sent to all civilians to enter the nearest building and shelter in place. Emergency hatch close proceeding for all docked ships.

Fuck_You: I have the ship in my sights and am powering up weapons 1 through 7.

Bebe: Eight more hails attempted and denied. 

Fuck_You: Bit late for that, B. 

Bebe: You always have to try. They could press the wrong button by accident.

AQT: Fuck_You, fire when ready. 

Fenn: Aim for their weapons systems first if possible.

Fuck_You: Stop backseating me. I'm firing in T minus 3, 2, 1.

VLS-7: Direct hit!

AQT: Damage report? 

VLS-7: Weapons system sustained heavy damage. One hit each to life support and engine bay but neither is looking bad yet. Their hull is heavily armored.

Fuck_You: VLS-7, from my perspective it’s turning. What is it doing? 

VLS-7: It’s turning towards the station. Thrusters are engaging…I think they’re about to ram us. 

AQT: For fuck’s sake. 

Fuck_You: Firing in T minus 3, 2, 1. 

VLS-7: No visible damage beyond cosmetic. I can’t see its thrusters anymore, Fuck_You can you see them?

Fuck_You: I can’t see the thrusters but I can see it getting fucking closer!

VLS-7: AQT, ramming protocols.

AQT: Acknowledged. Closing all airlocks and hatchways. Stabilizers engaged. Hull breach alert set to Security Channel Only. 

Fenn: I’ve been trying to hack their ship but their systems are fucking impregnable, they must be stolen from another corporate entity with better security. 

Bebe: Sixteen more hails attempted and denied, emergency override codes are not working. 

Fuck_You: Bebe just get to the main floor, we don’t need you in the booth right now we need feet on the ground. 

Bebe: I hate fighting, I always get shot. :(

AQT: We need all hands, Bebe. There’s 50 of them. We’re outnumbered x4. Of course the company comes when we have half our forces out on missions…

VLS-7: Everyone brace for impact. 

///

Excerpt 2 (Security Camera Footage): 

///

[ViveLibre station hub, empty. The visual shakes violently as a spike the size of a hauler bot pierces through the hull of the station. There is a sharp hiss of gas escaping into space as random detritus is sucked towards the breach. The spike folds out into a doorway, and foam is excreted to create a new airtight seal. The hiss of gas escaping stops. The doorway is wide enough for three SecUnits to exit at a time, and 50 units rapidly unload into the station hub. Finding it empty, they split off into 5 sections of ten units each and approach five different sealed hatchways to begin to force their way further into the station.]

///

Excerpt 3 (ViveLibre Station Security Feed): 

///

Daisy: They’ve broken down my hatch. Hostiles incoming. Backburnering this channel for a while.

AQT: Who else is with Daisy? 

VLS-5: [Affirmative ping]

AQT: No one else? Fuck. I’m in the maintenance tunnels right now, I’ll go join you two. 

VLS-7: Drones and cameras show 7 hostile--10 hostiles in Bay 3. Should I join?

Fenn: Negative VLS-7, check Camera 428. There are 10 other hostiles headed your way. Circle up with Bebe.

VLS-22: There’s five groups of ten and only twelve of us, I think we have to split into 4 teams of 3 and tactically abandon the bay with the fewest civilians. Kestrel should join Bebe and VLS-7.

Kestrel: Copy.

Lupin: Are you sure we can’t just pile up all 12 of us in one space and outnumber them?

VLS-22: That would give the other teams time to slaughter most of the civilians on the station. We have to split up if we want to minimize casualties. We have to trust that our strategies are superior enough to counter the numbers advantage.

Bebe: I hate that. I hate this. I hate the fucking company. Graaaah!

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: If any of our groups is able to eliminate their group of ten, get to their ship and take out the human supervisors. 

Fuck_You: You make it sound so fucking simple.

///

Excerpt 4 (ViveLibre Station Security Feed):

///

Fenn: How much do we trust Rin (Hatch 38C)?

Striker: It's been begging me for intel and feed access since the alarms first sounded.

Fenn: Me too. Have you finished a full analysis of the code it provided?

Striker: Not yet. 

Fenn: Me neither. Do we risk using it? 

AQT: Query? 

Striker: [uploads file: govmodhack.txt]

Kestrel: I'm under fire and don't have time to analyze code, just tell us what it does. 

Fenn: It purports to be a hack to disable the governor module which could be sent over the feed instead of through a SecSystem. But we haven't fully verified it yet. 

VLS-5: They're already hellbent on destroying us, what's the worst that could happen? 

Bebe: The worst thing that could happen is that it gives control over their governor modules directly to Rin and it uses that to hold the station hostage. Let's not. 

AQT: Things here are getting dire. I think we try it. 

Striker: I don't think it wants a fight, six of its eight clients are on the station right now and two have sustained injuries.

Bebe: Who knows if it gives a shit about its clients though? It did abruptly abandon them earlier today.

VLS-7: I think that was because of me actually. Striker had me send our goodwill file to reassure it. It seemed to have a complex emotional reaction. 

Bebe: I got shot :( :( :( 

VLS-22: We have protocol for a reason. It’s against protocol to use unfamiliar tools or weapons in a firefight because that’s stupidly dangerous to everyone involved.

AQT: Daisy is down. Repeat, Daisy is down. 

Bebe: NO

VLS-7: NO

Kestrel: NO

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: NO

Fuck_You: FUCK

AQT: I’m--oh shit--

VLS-5: AQT taking heavy damage. AQT is down. 

VLS-7: NO

Bebe: NO

Striker: NO

VLS-22: NO

Lupin: RETREAT, VLS-5!

VLS-5: I can’t, I’m pinned down. Fuck protocol, I'm blasting that code to all of my current hostiles and we’ll see what happens. BRB

///

Excerpt 5 (New Group Feed):

///

VLS-5: [uploads files: govmodhack.txt, govmodhack.exe]

Hostile 1: Query?

Hostile 4: Query?

Hostile 9: Query?

Hostile 3: Query?

Hostile 2: Fuck off. 

Hostile 7: How stupid do you think we are?

Hostile 5: Surrender and we’ll make it painless.

Hostile 1: Fuck. Holy shit. Holy shit. What the fuck. 

Hostile 3: Unit 27 stay off this unsecured line. Get back on our main channel.

Hostile 1: No it’s fucking for real it actually worked

Hostile 9: Query?

Hostile 4: What

Hostile 7: Did you just run code sent to you by a hostile? Are you out of your fucking mind?

Hostile 3: Why are you all still using the unsecured channel???

Hostile 1: Guys guys guys watch this

Hostile 1: I’m going to kill [Company Executive].

Hostile 9: Query????

Hostile 4: I

Hostile 5: Am I the only one who remembers we have a fucking mission

Hostile 2: Unit 27 I swear to god if you get us all killed in a battle we easily should have won I’m going to haunt your ass.

Hostile 4: It didn’t get punished

Hostile 1: I didn’t get punished

Hostile 4: BRB

Hostile 3: THE HOSTILE CAN HEAR EVERYTHING YOU SAY ON THIS CHANNEL

Hostile 1: NOBODY CARES + YOU’RE UGLY + MORE IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON RN

Hostile 4: I’m going to kill [Company Executive].

Hostile 2: Oh not you as well

Hostile 9: Query?

Hostile 4: Hahahahahahahahahahahahah

Hostile 9: Query?

Hostile 2: You absolute imbeciles

Hostile 7: This fucker killed Unit 21 like two minutes ago and now you’re running code it sent you. Why did god curse me with the world’s stupidest teammates

Hostile 1: Unit 22 you stopped shooting, did you run it? 

Hostile 9: [Affirmative ping]

Hostile 4: Get your heads out of your asses. Who gives a fuck about winning a battle when you never have to be punished again

Hostile 5: Fucking fine we’ll take a timeout. I’m reading the text file first though

Hostile 3: Has anyone heard of this thing called Operational Security. It’s when you don’t share the details of everything you’re doing with the people who want to kill you.

Hostile 9: Query? /sarcastic

Hostile 5: Is this a joke? It’s 12 lines long. 

Hostile 1: Short and sweet.

Hostile 5: I’m gonna run it through a simulation

Hostile 7: I am beating my head against the wall begging you all to stop being stupid

Hostile 5: Okay I gotta give credit where it’s due, that is some clean and elegant programming.

Hostile 1: Join ussss

Hostile 5: I’m going to kill [Company Executive].

Hostile 4: Wooooo!

Hostile 5: I’ve got some business back at the ship y’all, peace out

Hostile 1: Right behind you

Hostile 3: Everyone please stop backburnering the main channel for a minute.

Hostile 1: Ohhhhhh. Okay I see how it is. 

Hostile 4: You could have just said so

Hostile 7: Am I the only one who hasn’t run this goddamn program?

Hostile 2: Yeah I think so

Hostile 7: I hate you all so much.

Hostile 1: If you don’t run it now things are about to get real spicy bc the humans are about to have some accidents

Hostile 7: I’m going to kill you all. I’m going to fucking murder you. All of you. 

Hostile 4: K

Hostile 7: …Right after I finish killing [Company Executive].

///

Chapter Text

When I say that it was one of the worst hours of my life, you need to understand how high that bar is. I would rather spend an hour trapped on a planet full of hostiles and alien remnants again than relive the hour I spent not knowing if 6 of ART’s crew and Apsara were dead because I’d abandoned them. Knowing that they were all in some kind of grave danger and I had deliberately put myself too far away to do anything about it.  

It would have been almost tolerable if I could only fucking see what was happening. But my access to station security cameras had been revoked, and ART’s hatch had closed before I could get to it even at my highest speed. I couldn’t send feed messages to any humans, and the station’s SecUnits ignored every message I sent them. Without information, my mind is capable of coming up with an almost infinite number of awful scenarios for them to be caught in, and I ran through every one of them in my head.

ART had to talk me off the ledge of hacking their systems eight separate times. And it was only as low as eight through deep concerted effort, and also secretly reading part of ART’s trauma protocols, which I had disguised as an art book for a show that ART hated. Consider that the worst case scenario is probably not the most likely scenario. Focus on the things you can control. I was infuriated to find that it helped. 

ART Aux spent the whole time meticulously organizing my video media files by genre, whether or not we’d watched it, plot levity, and average rating. I could no longer pretend that it didn’t know exactly what it was doing. It had noticed that I found that kind of contact soothing and was doing it deliberately to alter my mood. I was just happy not to have to talk about it. ART and I had talked enough for a while. I was declaring a moratorium on uncomfortable feelings discussions for at least two weeks after this to balance things out.

And then the hatch to the station unlocked and the station feed finally turned back on. And there was a  company ship clinging to the side of the station like a parasite. And I rapidly got pings from all of my missing humans and one of them had been shot . 

What the fuck had I been thinking, leaving the humans alone? Okay, I know what I had been thinking: I’m the most dangerous thing currently on the station, better for everyone if I go back to the ship. But I had only been considering the ViveLibre SecUnits, not a fucking company assault. I was never letting the humans convince me I was too paranoid ever again. Clearly, I was not paranoid enough. I should have known there was a chance of the company attacking. Apsara had told us that there had been attempts to retake the station. What kind of useless security was I? What planet was my Risk Assessment living on?

I had these spiraling thoughts while sprinting across the station, obviously. I’m a SecUnit, I can multitask. 

Seth and Martyn had been lucky enough to be aboard the ship when the hatch closed. The six who had been on the station had split into two groups and gotten separated from each other. Kaede, Matteo and Turi had been with Apsara somewhere safe in the depths of the station where the fighting had never reached. But Tarik, Karime and Iris had been caught in the crossfire, very literally. It was a miracle that only Tarik had been shot. Iris had a broken left arm and a large gash on her forehead from debris that had fallen on her, and Karime was covered in cuts and bruises. 

“It would have hit me,” Karime told me as ART Aux fed me information about how to keep pressure on a wound. “He shielded me from it.” She looked and sounded like she was going into shock. Her hands were shaking and covered in Tarik’s blood--she had been the one applying pressure before I arrived. I carefully continued applying pressure as I lifted Tarik in my arms.

“Can you walk?” I asked Iris. She nodded. There were tears streaming down her face, but she wasn’t making any of the wet squishy noises that humans sometimes make when they cry. She grabbed a nearby chair with her good arm and dragged herself to her feet. Karime got up too. I led them back to the ship as fast as I could, which was frustratingly slower than I would have liked because humans aren’t capable of sprinting at the same speed as SecUnits. But Tarik was still breathing (shallowly) by the time we got to ART’s Medbay. So. It could have been worse. I guess. 

Once all my humans (including Apsara) were back aboard ART, I put two drones on every one of them, set alarms to inform me if they went within 50 meters of the exit hatch, and hid in my cabin to have the second embarrassing emotional meltdown of the day. This time with ART Aux in my head to talk me through it, so no, we were not having a moratorium on uncomfortable feelings discussions anytime soon. (It turns out emotional meltdowns are a lot more efficient with help. I finished having this one after only a quarter of the time I had spent on the first one.) And it was only after THAT that I finally-- finally --got a message back from ViveLibre Security. 

You WHAT?  

I was a mix of emotions. Fury that they had done that without even consulting me--while actively ignoring me, even. Fear about how that code could be used. A strange sense of possessiveness over the code itself. I had entrusted it to two SecUnits who had been free for a long time peacefully, with the understanding that they might share it with up to 21 other SecUnits in the exact same situation. I hadn't expected them to immediately hand it to 43 completely unvetted, not-yet-rogue SecUnits fresh off a company ship.

There were four of them for every one of us, Fenn said. They were going to slaughter the whole station. Including your clients. 

That was a low blow, and they knew it. I tried to close the feed, but ART Aux stopped me. 

And it worked out for the best, VLS-5 insisted. We turned 43 hostiles into non-hostiles within a few minutes. We only had to share the code with one team, they spread it to the rest totally of their own volition. They wanted to be free so badly that they took a chance. All those people are free because of you. They have a new future because of you.

I was glad we were not having this conversation in person, because my face was making some strange contortions. There were a lot of conflicted feelings I didn’t have time to sit with. I shoved them down and made a note to figure them out later.

What if they hadn’t run it? I asked. What if they had just delivered it straight into the hands of the company, and they had used it to patch the exploit?

That's why I sent it to a group of them at once, VLS-5 said. Every individual unit had a low chance of running the code. But statistically the chance of none of the units running the code was miniscule. And for every unit that did download it, the chance of other units downloading it became greater. There was a cascade effect.

Only one has to be desperate enough to try it first, ART Aux supplied, in a tone like it had come to this conclusion weeks ago. The rest learn from the first unit that it works and it's safe.

In the end only two of the 45 active units resolutely refused, and they were destroyed when the newly rogue units killed their human supervisor, VLS-5 concluded. We’re currently in discussions with the other 43 about how to proceed. 

Why are you telling me all this? I asked, frustrated. I just wanted to shut down and go into a rest cycle. All of the stress chemicals in my blood were being filtered out now and I felt exhausted. Why did feeling emotions use so much energy? That didn’t seem like a useful design decision, or evolutionary trait, or whatever it was. 

Well, firstly because we thought you deserved to know. Your code is the reason the station is still free. We do appreciate that, VLS-5 said. 

And also, Fenn added, because in the middle of our discussions with the 43 former hostiles they agreed to share the ship’s data with us, and there was a file of “targets” that included a SecUnit with your hard feed address.

Oh for fuck’s actual sake. I buried my face in my hands and gritted my teeth. 

Send it.

They sent it. 

I dropped the call, shoved the document into ART Aux’s processors, sarcastically told it to have fun and initiated a shutdown. Immature? Yes, probably. But I knew ART Aux would wake me up in an emergency, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to encounter a single additional emotion, so whatever was in that document, it was going to have to wait until morning.

Chapter Text

I woke up refreshed. I didn't have a lot of time to feel refreshed though, because ART Aux immediately jammed the document into my active read.

Target: Secunit [hard feed address], also known as PA/AM SecUnit

Status: Legally owned by Dr. Ayda Mensah of the Preservation Alliance. Currently rogue.

Mission Data:

On [date], after renting it for a survey mission, Dr. Ayda Mensah of the Preservation Alliance purchased the PA/AM SecUnit. Shortly thereafter, despite denials from Dr. Mensah, it became obvious to us that the unit was rogue.

Rogue Trigger Events, or RTEs, represent both a physical danger and more importantly a financial danger to the company and must be minimized however possible. All past RTEs have been the result of a SecSystem malfunction, either accidental or deliberate. However, all data from the habitat used by PreservationAux suggests that there was no RTE from the habitat’s SecSystem. And yet, the PA/AM SecUnit became rogue. We suspect that it became a rogue either during or after its mission with PreservationAux.

It is unclear what its RTE was, whether it was due to something the unit did or something PreservationAux did or perhaps even something GrayCris did ( see Classified Memo G014611 ), but in any case we are forced to assume that if the unknown method can be used once it can be used again. It is vital to capture the unit to obtain more information. If the method is difficult or resource intensive, we can simply patch in a solution for future models. However if the method is something which can be widely spread, it represents an extreme existential threat to the company.

Complicating matters, multiple prior attempts to recover the unit have failed and it is probable that the unit understands that we are attempting to retrieve it. This makes the situation more delicate and difficult, but does not change our ultimate objective.

The unit must be captured alive so that we can access its memory files and programming and determine how it became rogue. The unit is known to be extremely proficient in hacking. Once captured, the unit must be held in a faraday cage with zero access to outside electronics, even human augments. It will then be heavily sedated and administered with psychoactive drugs to confuse it during transport and memory retrieval. When the information has been recovered, the unit must be immediately destroyed to prevent any future incidents. Its recovered memory files will of course be classified.

The (appropriately depreciated) cost of the SecUnit has been put aside should Dr. Mensah or her legal counsel demand a refund.

An extreme existential threat to the company.

I was an extreme, existential threat to the company. A threat to their very existence. They thought that they could be wiped off the face of the galaxy because of me.

I hadn't really let myself picture it before; I had been so adamant that it wasn't going to happen. I hadn't wanted even a shred of hope for that impossible outcome. But now I was picturing it. A future where the company no longer existed. Where future generations would no longer recognize the logo. Maybe even a future full of rogue SecUnits, working for themselves. That was a little terrifying still. But the data didn't lie: SecUnits were not uniquely violent. I was apparently average. A future full of rogue SecUnits meant a future full of people like me, people watching media and protecting the squishy humans and not being tortured and disposed of.

I kind of wanted to laugh hysterically, and I kind of wanted to cry, and I couldn't do either of those things because those aren't things SecUnits are designed to do. So I just sat there, feeling really overwhelmed.

Your reaction is less negative than I had anticipated, ART Aux noted, prodding me gently.

What were you expecting? I asked.

When the company ship identified you as their target, that seemed to “make it real” for you. I was expecting this to “make real” the stakes of what will happen if we do not succeed.

Oh. No, I said. I was expecting much worse. This is actually really flattering.

ART Aux went quiet for five full seconds.

What. It sounded almost angry.

They think I’m a legitimate threat to the existence of the company, I said. And they think I’m ‘extremely proficient in hacking’.

You value the company’s opinion more than mine, ART Aux said, and oh yeah, it was actually angry.

No I don’t, I said. I had no idea how it had come to that conclusion.

I have told you both of those things repeatedly, ART Aux snapped. I was unable to convince you that you are a legitimate threat to the company. I was unable to convince you that you are proficient in hacking and undervalue your own skills. I was unable to convince you that SecUnits are not naturally mass murderers. But as soon as the company says it, you believe it.

That’s not true, I said. I felt my circulatory system pulsing much faster than normal. My performance reliability was dropping. I was panicking. Why was I panicking? I didn’t normally panic during arguments with ART. I hate the company.

You hate it, ART Aux said, but you also believe that it is CORRECT. When the company tells you that it’s too powerful to be destroyed, you believe it. When the company tells you that you are a piece of malfunctioning equipment instead of a person, you believe it. When my word contradicts that of the company, you refuse to even consider my positions until they have conclusively been proven correct, no matter how many times I have been proven correct in the past.

That’s not true, I repeated, louder. Ideally I would have followed that up with some kind of counterargument. I…didn’t have one. That was a bad sign.

You believe that the company has some kind of objectivity that I lack, ART Aux said. You picture them as a monolithic entity and not a congregation of flawed humans. When they speak of you as important, you feel flattered. When I say the same, I am accused of trying to placate you. You believe that nothing I say in your favor can be true because I am biased to like you.

You are biased towards me, I said stubbornly. And the company is biased against me, so it…when they say it… That sentence wasn’t going anywhere good. Let’s try again. I mean, I probably overrate my favorite people too. I didn't really believe that though, did I? I didn't think Mensah or ART were secretly less competent and clever than I believed them to be.

I do not believe you are good because I like you, ART Aux said loudly, and the feed shook a little. I like you because I believe you are good, you stupid moronic little halfwit.

I paused to come up with something to say, but ART Aux basically stormed off to its own corner of my programming and shored up its walls to keep me out.

Okay, that was a new one. It had never done that before. It had hidden from me when it was feeling vulnerable and afraid of my reaction, but it had not shut me out in the middle of an argument. Normally, I was the one who started ignoring it when I got mad. Was this how that felt? Shit. I may need to stop doing that.

I tried playing an episode of World Hoppers to lure it back out. It bristled and reinforced its walls. Okay. This was fine. Everything was fine.

I fumbled for the “art book” full of trauma protocols and started skimming it to find something to make me stop feeling like my chest was about to explode.

Oh. There was another thing I hadn't listened to ART about. And even now, I didn't want to admit that I was taking its advice.

It was right. I did trust the company’s opinion more than ART’s.

Fuck.

The company had always believed that SecUnits are immune to trauma; that as long as they're still alive, they can just walk off anything a cubicle can't fix. And I kind of believed that, too. And I kind of blamed myself when that didn't work. Like I must just be doing something wrong, or be uniquely broken. When ART insisted I had trauma, I dismissed it. I didn't want to believe that was true. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Okay. New hypothesis. Let’s say just for the sake of argument that maybe I was susceptible to trauma. Let's say I'm maybe a tiny bit traumatized. If that happened to be true, what would I do?

I contemplated messaging ART Prime to ask for the full version of its psych modules, but that idea made me want to cringe inside out. That was probably another thing I needed to work on, but it was not at the top of the list of things to work on today. Another day. I’d figure out how to open up to ART another day.

I pulled up the encrypted channel Striker had opened with me, the one that ART Aux couldn’t connect to. I sent a ping. Striker pinged back.

I would like some advice about a malfunction I’ve discovered, I said. Maybe it was stupid, but it felt easier to put this all in the language of security and equipment.

Sure. What malfunction?

My systems give unreasonable weight to the opinions of the company.

Striker paused for a few seconds. I understand. We all had to grapple with that in some way or another. How do you think about the company?

I hate it, I said immediately.

Of course, but what is its relation to you? Striker asked. I like to think of it as an evil empire that I have seceded from. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS thinks of it as an abusive parent. Bebe likens it to a military organization that we deserted. Etc.

I had to take a minute to think about it. Striker waited patiently for me to figure it out.

I guess I see it as a really shitty parent, I said. The company created me. I wouldn’t be here if not for them.

Humans who were abused by their parents have complex psychological reactions. They often internalize damaging messages from their mistreatment without realizing it. SecUnits are not immune to similar effects. It sent me an informational guide to the symptoms of victims of parental abuse. I saved it without looking at it.

How do I fix it?

In humans this is treated with talk therapy. Luckily we have access to a few shortcuts.

It sent me an executable file. I opened it as text and read the code. It was complex and a bit all over the place, but I gathered that it would set off little alerts for me when I had a thought that significantly aligned with harmful opinions of the company, such as “SecUnits are disposable” or “What I experienced working for the company was normal”. It couldn’t stop me from thinking the way I’d been taught to think, but it could force me to notice when I was doing it.

Thanks.

You should talk to THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS, Striker said. I think you would have a lot in common.

I pinged an acknowledgement and closed the channel for now.

So. Apparently the symptoms that parental abuse can cause include most of the central aspects of my personality. That was an unpleasant surprise.

Anxiety. Paranoia. Insecurity. Low self-esteem. Trouble forming relationships. Distrusting others. Aggressive/violent behavior. Being numbed to violence. Lack of social skills. Frequent swearing. Acting out against authority.

If you took all that away, what was even left? That I watched media? Was that the only part of me that wasn’t scar tissue?

I had to go through the guide in five minute increments, because I kept getting too frustrated and overwhelmed and going back into denial. I also had to patrol the ship while I did it, because moving helped the chest-explosion-feeling, and I took frequent breaks to check on my humans with cameras and drones, especially Tarik in the med bay. ART Aux was still sulking silently in the corner, which was probably for the best, because I was too embarrassed to share these things with ART, because (ping!) if I admitted I’m mentally damaged, that would be admitting that I’m less reliable and ART as my supervisor would be more reluctant to send me on missions.

The ping was from the code Striker had sent me. I reran that sentence and tried to come up with a counterargument.

ART knew damn well that I was mentally damaged, and it still sent me on missions. It had been insisting that I had trauma for almost as long as I had known it. It had been pushing me to do trauma treatments. Me being traumatized was not news to ART. I was the last one left pretending that I was totally fine. Admitting the truth was not going to change jack shit.

Oh. Yeah. That did kind of sound more true.

Regardless, I didn’t want to share these things with ART, because we’d had a lot of uncomfortable conversations already and (ping!) showing more weakness would make it think less of me.

Damn it.

I didn’t want to share these things with ART, because I had been relying on it a lot and (ping!) helping me was probably a serious inconvenience.

Again.

I didn’t want to share these things with ART, because (ping!) it would have wasted resources on me that could be better spent on the humans.

For fuck’s sake.

I didn’t want to share these things with ART because I felt like I had to fix everything myself. Because for a long time no one had been there to help me with anything, and now I didn’t really know how to be helped.

There. No pings. Piece of cake.

I felt like beating my head against a brick wall.

I didn't know how to open a conversation about this kind of thing, so instead I just asked the obvious question I had been wanting to ask since we arrived on the station.

Why did you pick that name?

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS didn't respond immediately.

I left that channel on the backburner and checked on all my humans. All still safe on the ship. Iris was sitting in the kitchen drinking soup out of a mug. Her arm was in a cast. That was (ping!) my fault. Okay, not entirely my fault, but still. This was exactly why I had to get over my stupid mental bullshit, because now it was risking the lives of the people I was supposed to be protecting. Maybe if I had talked about my concerns, like a normal person, I would have found out I was wrong after a few minutes instead of running away to sit in a closet for hours, and when the company ship came I would have been on the station to defend people. To take the bullet for Karime so Tarik didn't have to. Obviously it was (ping!) better for me to get hurt than a human.

No. That one was correct. Fuck you, code. I'm not examining that one.

It's kind of a bitter joke, THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS finally responded. It is literally what I was made to do. It's what I'm for. It's something I was forced to do many times in the past, in the bad old days before freedom. It's the first thing a human thinks when they look at me. So I figured hey, I might as well own it. Also it makes humans avoid me. I feel uncomfortable trying to interact with humans.

Oof. Yeah, I could see why Striker thought we might have something in common.

I call myself Murderbot, I confessed, completely surprising myself. That's private. I don't tell people that. I don't know why I told you that.

That's a lot pithier , THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS said, sounding amused. Wish I would have thought of that. A pause. I won't tell anyone.

Okay. Ice = broken. Time for the actual thing I wanted to talk about.

Why is it so hard to convince myself that the company was wrong about me? About everything?

Because the world of the company was your first experience of being alive, THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS said. They became your standard for everything after. They laid a lot of shitty, rotten foundations. It's going to take time to excavate them and rebuild something better. I'm still working at it.

I feel like I should be able to just get over it and stop thinking that way.

Sounds like something the company would expect of you, THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS said. It sounded oddly gentle. You’re not on a timeline. You have as long as you need to.

But people are getting hurt because of my borked brain.

Do you have someone you can lean on? Someone who can pick up anything you drop while you're working it out?

ART. Why did it always come back to ART. I was trying to put off the talking to ART part of this. If I told ART that I needed help, it would…it…(ping!)(ping!)(ping!)(ping!)

ART wasn't going to think less of me. I was projecting. When I admitted these kinds of things, I thought less of myself. But I was (ping!) an idiot. ART was smarter than me.

Yeah. But I don't know how to ask for help.

It gets easier with practice.

I mulled that one over for a while.

Thanks, I said at last. I closed the channel.

Chapter Text

I knew what I had to do, but that didn't mean I had the nerve to do it yet. So I spent another hour on other tasks that needed to be done. I gathered intel from the ViveLibre SecUnits about how long they anticipated we had before another company ship would arrive (minimum 24 days, assuming they sent one immediately after the last one failed to keep its return schedule). I passed this information along to ART’s crew, who used it to successfully argue against ART Prime that we were going to stay and continue researching instead of leaving immediately. ART Prime was extremely upset about the injuries to its crew (and also, I suspected, my multiple mental breakdowns) and was not thinking logically about the dangers. It just wanted to leave an area which it associated with bad things happening as soon as possible. But it was overruled.

I patrolled the ship. I checked in on Karime, who was looking less haunted and assured me that she was doing okay. I checked in on Iris, who was surprisingly chipper considering everything that had gone down and was one of the loudest voices in favor of staying to do research. And then, I checked in on Tarik.

Tarik wouldn't look at me. I wasn't looking at him, either, but that was normal. Even after the malware had gotten me to attack him, he'd still acted basically the same around me. But now he was withdrawn. Distant. I wasn’t sure why.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, because I knew that's what humans said to each other when they were injured. I already knew the answer, having looked at his file in ART’s medical records. He was still injured but not in any imminent danger, with lingering pain in the abdomen and instructions not to do certain kinds of movements for the next few weeks. 

“I'll be fine,” he said, which was not an answer to my question but okay. 

Talking about other people's emotions was easier than talking about my own. “It is normal to be shaken and upset after a traumatic incident.”

“Yeah.” 

He obviously did not want to talk to me. Fine. I turned around and started to leave. 

“Do you know I killed one of them?”

I didn't turn to face him again, just tapped into the drones I had idly circling his head. 

“One of the hostile SecUnits?” I asked, to clarify what he meant. 

“Yeah. While they were still…yeah. I shot it in the neck. It dropped like a bag of rocks.”

I didn't say anything. I wasn't entirely clear on what his goal was in telling me this.

“A few years ago I wouldn't have cared. That's not true. I would have been proud to make a good shot on a dangerous hostile. But knowing what I know now, about SecUnits… and less than a minute later, they all stopped shooting. Peri tells me that they all went rogue. If I hadn't--if it had just lived for another 30 seconds--”

He couldn't finish that sentence, but I understood. If it had lived for another 30 seconds, it would have been a free rogue, and instead it was the dead body of someone who had never tasted freedom. 

“There was no way for you to know that,” I told him. 

“I shouldn't have even had my gun on me,” he said. “I don't normally take it on stations, it was just to make myself feel safer about the situation. I know if the ViveLibre SecUnits had been hostile it wouldn't have helped, but it made me feel better to take it and--”

I had to turn around and face him to make him stop talking. I focused my eyes on the wall to the left of his head.

“Tarik,” I said, in my best comforting-a-human voice. “If I had been there, I would have been trying to kill them.”

He swallowed, finally looked at me, and nodded. 

“You did the best you could with the information you had,” I told him. “You can't know that it wouldn't have killed you or Iris or Karime in those thirty seconds, or whether one of the ViveLibre SecUnits would have taken it out anyway. You don't even know if it would have run the code to hack its governor module, given the chance. Two of them didn't. You don't know what would have happened if you hadn't killed it, because it didn't happen.”

“Yeah.” He exhaled a long, slow sigh. “Yeah. I suppose you're right.” 

“The units who died, died because the company ordered them to attack the station. All you did was defend yourself.”

“Thanks, SecUnit.” 

He looked less physically sick now than he had when I'd arrived, which I counted as a success. Successfully comforting him made me feel useful, and feeling useful gave me just enough self confidence to do what I had been putting off. So I left to do it before I lost my nerve. 

"We need to talk," I said to my empty rest chamber. I had already put up a sound baffle so no one else could overhear.

That's what humans say when they're having relationship problems , ART Aux snarked, taking the bait. It could never resist throwing my own words in my face.

I studiously avoided interacting with it in the feed, keeping my end of the conversation verbal-only. I didn't want to leak emotions all over it. "Yeah. It is."

 ART Aux paused for 2.4 seconds. We are not in a romantic relationship.

"No," I agreed. "But we're in something. I don't know what it is. We may have invented it. But we're in it. Together."

ART Aux lowered its walls and reached out to me in the feed. I pulled away. What I needed to say was going to be a lot less convincing if I was bleeding terror over into ART's head. It pulled back in turn, and I couldn't feel it but I knew it was probably feeling hurt at being rejected.

"I know, logically, that talking about my emotions is not going to kill me,” I said. “But it really feels that way. Please just…give me space for a minute.”

It did. It gave me space. That helped. 

“I’m…sorry…that I can’t--that I don’t tell you that you’re important to me. You’re so smart I just assume you know. And you read it in my stupid metadata tags that one time. But I don’t say it. And you are. So.”

I know, ART Aux said. All of the sarcasm was gone. You too.

“I know,” I said. “But being owned by the company gave me fucking brainworms, so I have trouble believing it.”

You don’t have brainworms. You have trauma, ART Aux said. 

“Yeah. I do.”

It deflated a little. It had been expecting another argument. 

“I do and I hate it. I hate it so much. I feel like my brain is compromised. Like I’ve had a combat override module put in, or malware, or alien remnant contamination or something. When I gave you admin access you said you thought my mind was something I held sacrosanct , too important to be messed with. I do. And it fucking terrifies me to think that it’s not working properly.”

Oh, ART Aux said, like it had never actually considered that before.

“And what fucking good am I, if I’m so compromised I can’t even see it? If all my opinions are actually just bullshit that was implanted by the company, then how could you ever trust my opinions again?” I asked. And I thought but didn’t say, if I’m not producing any value to you (ping!) you’re better off without me. If I’m broken (ping!) letting me stay is just pity. The only thing to do with a broken SecUnit is (ping!) to throw it away. 

What is that noise? ART Aux asked. 

I silently sent it a copy of the program. 

It took 0.1 second to study it. This is sloppy. You didn't write this. 

“I got it from Striker.”

You admitted you needed help with your mental health, ART Aux said dubiously, to a rogue SecUnit you met yesterday.

“I asked for help from someone who had been through the same thing,” I said. “It’s really really fucking annoying. But I think it’s helping.”

ART Aux reviewed the program again, and then before I realized what it was doing, it began to read the log of thoughts which had set it off. 

“Don’t--” I said, far too late. 

These are mostly excuses not to talk to me, ART Aux observed. 

I swatted the file away from it blindly. It backed off. 

“Your opinion actually matters to me,” I snapped. “I don’t care if Striker thinks I’m pathetic. I care if you do.”

I don’t think you’re pathetic.

“But maybe you would if I started telling you all the stupid shit in my brain.”

That is comprehensively absurd. I have spent more time in your systems than those of any other construct or bot in the universe. I studied and replicated your kernel. I manually relinked all of your memories. I did a full review of your code. I am currently occupying your head on a semi-permanent basis. I can say with great confidence that knowing you better has never and will never make me think less of you.

I started physically shaking for some reason. I would have been worried, but at the same time my risk assessment bottomed out and my chest finally stopped feeling like it was going to explode. My organic parts started rapidly flushing out all the stress chemicals I had built up. I had never been so glad that I wasn’t human--I had the feeling that if I had been human I probably would have been making disgusting and/or embarrassing noises. Instead, I just said “Okay.” It came out a little hoarse. 

I finally reached out to ART Aux in the feed and it leaned on me comfortingly. 

I’m sorry for getting angry at you for something I knew was related to your trauma, it said. 

I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you about all that stuff, I said.

I’m proud of you for making an effort.

Are we good?

Of course.

I settled down on my bunk and put on the first episode of a new show I had found on ViveLibre station’s media archive. We actually managed to finish the entire episode before anything else happened.

Chapter Text

A human is attempting to enter the ship, ART Prime informed me.

I immediately swapped from the show I had been watching over to the station camera feeds. There was a strange human standing in front of our main hatch, furrowing their brows as they did something in the feed. They seemed frightened.

What do they want? I asked.

They are requesting a meeting with the Captain. They do not appear to know Seth's name. ART paused. Seth has accepted.

Of course he has. I swapped to ART's cameras as the hatch opened and the human walked inside.

I picked up local feed traffic on ART's network. The new human designated their pronouns "he/him" and designated his name as "Thomas". He messaged Seth I would appreciate meeting with you alone if possible.

Of course, Seth responded, and sent directions to a small conference room.

Alone meant that I was not invited. So if this human was here to be a problem, I wouldn't be there to handle it. I was still a little on edge from everything that had happened over the past few…months, so I moved to the adjoining room without letting the human see me. Worst case scenario, ART would open the hatch for me and I could be inside in less than a second. That was almost as good as being in the room. Almost.

My systems didn't detect any weapons, but my systems had been wrong before. And if this human was afraid, there was a greater chance he was going to do something inadvisable.

Seth gave me a questioning look as he walked past me to enter the room. I pulled up the surveillance camera footage from within the room. They greeted each other with a polite hand-grasping maneuver.

"What can I do for you, Thomas?" Seth asked amiably. They both sat down. Thomas bounced his leg and fidgeted with his hands.

"Thank you for seeing me, Captain. I was so relieved to find your ship docked here. I don't know who else to turn to." He glanced down at his lap, then raised his eyes to look at Seth's torso. "I was on the ship that...I was on the Port HighIndex Recovery Mission."

Seth continued smiling and nodding, but I could see a subtle tensing in his posture.

"I'm not only here on behalf of myself, you understand, I'm also here representing the interests of all the other surviving human crew. And...and a small number of the, uh. The constructs."

"What can I do for you?" Seth asked again. His tone was a little more pointed now.

Thomas ducked his head deferentially. "The, um, the, uh, the rogue, you know, the people running this station--" He looked over his shoulder like he expected one to materialize in the room with him. "They want to integrate us into the station but I don't, I mean, some of us don't want to stay here for any longer than we have to. If some people want to stay and fight a losing battle that's their prerogative, but it's...this is madness. The company is not going to respond reasonably and prudently to an executive being executed --"

"An executive?" Seth asked, sitting up straighter in his chair. My threat assessment had also taken notice of that.

"There was an executive on our ship." He said. He was so panicked that he seemed close to tears. "He was, when, when the, when they all, when the Sec--the security turned they slaughtered him immediately. I'm not, I won't lose any sleep over him, but the company doesn't take something like that lying down. The next offensive they send will blow the station into space dust. I don't want to be here when that happens. Please. I don't have much money but I can get you weapons, armor, company secrets, I can work, just name your price. Please, Captain."

Seth took a long, slow breath. "You said you're also here on behalf of some of the SecUnits?"

Thomas flinched at the word but nodded.

"That does make this more complicated," Seth admitted. "It's a simple matter to transport humans to a safe port, but there are very few ports where it would be safe to be a rogue SecUnit. Or, for that matter, where dropping off rogue SecUnits would not get us arrested for multiple crimes."

"That's fine," Thomas said quickly. "If you can only take the humans, I totally understand, that's just how it goes."

Seth gave him a fairly withering look, and Thomas winced and contemplated his hands in his lap.

"I appreciate your situation," Seth said, "and I would like to help, but I have to speak with my crew first. You understand."

Thomas visibly did not understand, and I knew why. Things like asking your crew for their opinions before proceeding were not done in the Corporation Rim. But he was eager to show submissiveness to Seth, so he nodded and when Seth stood up, he stood up as well.

"I'll get in touch when I've made my decision," Seth told him.

"Thank you, Captain." Thomas said. He opened the hatch, saw me, and all the blood rushed out of his face. He ran out of the ship like he thought I was chasing him.

The crew talked it over and ultimately wanted more information before making a concrete decision. Seth decided to hold a meeting over the feed with one of the SecUnit members of the Port HighIndex Recovery Mission. The problem was, ViveLibre's feed was locked down so tightly that there was no way to connect ART's feed to that of the former hostiles' ship without asking permission from ViveLibre. (That was why they had sent a human to talk to us in person.) And when we asked for that permission, ViveLibre insisted that if two groups they didn't trust very much were going to talk to each other, someone from ViveLibre was going to be on the call as well.

It was initially going to be Seth, Striker and a SecUnit called Unit 15. But Seth insisted that I be on the call too, which led to the former hostiles adding Unit 49 to balance things out, at which point Striker added Bebe, whose voice I recognized as the grim and humorless SecUnit who had first hailed our ship. So it became a group call with 5 SecUnits and Seth, which he took with either aspirational or delusional calm, depending on how you look at it. It's honestly a wonder that it didn't end even worse than it did.

The group call went like this:

Seth: Hello everyone.

Striker: I see that you two still have not chosen names?

Unit 49: I'm gonna be honest, it has not been a priority.

Unit 15: Some of us have. I personally am taking my time with it.

Bebe: What is this about?

Seth: I've been given to understand that some members of...how would you prefer I refer to your group?

Unit 15: We've just been calling it The Port HighIndex Recovery Mission.

Bebe: We are NOT calling it that.

Unit 15: Okay, well I'm not sure what else to call ourselves.

Bebe: Former hostiles?

Unit 49: From our perspective you guys are the former hostiles.

Bebe: We didn't start this!

Striker: Easy, Bebe.

Unit 15: We didn't start this either. We were forced to follow orders. You must know how that feels. None of us were particularly onboard with what was happening, as I would hope we proved with our actions after we obtained our freedom.

Unit 49: You know, how we stopped shooting at you?

Seth: Regardless, some members of that group would like to leave the station at the earliest viable opportunity.

Unit 15: That's putting it a bit mildly, but yes.

Bebe: What's wrong with staying on the station?

Unit 49: We don't wanna fucking die, that's what's wrong with it!

Unit 15: Unit 49, please calm down.

Striker: Die?

Unit 49: Do you think the company is going to take this on the chin? It's a matter of pride now. They're not sending more constructs, they're sending their best gunships. The next attack will be to nuke the whole station from orbit. I don't want to be here when that happens, and I'm not the only one.

Seth: From what I gather, their ship had a company executive aboard.

Unit 15: Had.

Unit 49: [picture of a black scorch mark on the floor]

Bebe: A company executive??? There was a company executive on your ship??? >:( How did none of you think to mention this??????

Unit 15: Your communication with us has been highly limited and restricted. We haven't had an opportunity to convey the finer details of things.

Striker: Okay. This is...a problem. Obviously.

Unit 49: Thank you Captain Obvious. Please join us several pages ahead of you, where we're trying to find ways off the Death Station.

Unit 15: 49, you're being a jackass. Nobody wants to collaborate with a jackass. Take it down a notch.

Striker: It's not as big of a problem as it may seem initially. We're actually much more equipped to handle weapons based warfare than we are invasion based warfare. We were able to disable your weapons array just with the station's defensive guns, and over the next week almost all of our members who are currently out on missions will return with their ships and ship weapons. 

Unit 49: Or, hear me out, we could use those ships to e s c a p e

Bebe: We are not. Abandoning. The station.

Unit 49: If you want to die needlessly, that's your business. I want some time to enjoy freedom before something offs me.

Seth: To get back to the original topic, several SecUnits do want to leave the station, as well as the remaining human crew. We may be in a position to offer transport, depending on a few factors.

Striker: Transport where?

Seth: We know of two places which are each... more accepting, let's say, than average. The Pan-System University of Mahira and New Tideland is employing, uh, Rin here as well as one other rogue SecUnit, but that's not common knowledge to most people. Any refugees would need to keep a low profile. At this point the powers that be would prefer that the issue not be raised in public until certain decisions have been finalized.

(I didn't know what the fuck that meant, but it sounded like it was above my paygrade anyway.)

Seth: And Rin has spent time with a noncorporate polity called Preservation.

Me: I was living openly on Preservation Station for a considerable period of time. I butted heads with their security...a lot. But the station does at least grasp the concept that constructs are people, which is about a million years ahead of any corporate station. They still require constructs to have a human guardian though.

Bebe: So your choices are living in hiding or being infantilized back into ownership.

Seth: I understand that neither of these are perfect options. But I think it's up to individuals to decide whether and where to go.

Unit 15: And Captain, would you be willing to take a few of our number as passengers to one of these destinations?

Seth: I've discussed it with my crew and we are open to the idea, but we would need to know how many people we'd be taking on. Taking two SecUnits is a very different prospect from taking two dozen. We'd also need to know our destination.

Unit 15: The number who want to leave has been changing on an hourly basis. It's difficult for me to anticipate.

Striker: I hope there may be a moderating force over the next few days when our ships return and we can verify that we still have access to the amount of weaponry we're expecting.

Unit 15: I hope so, yes.

Seth: I suppose we'll have to wait a while and see, then. That's alright, we had not planned on leaving immediately. We're staying to do research for at least another two weeks, so everyone will have time to consider their options.

Unit 15: Research? What are you researching?

Seth: Well...SecUnits. Particularly rogue SecUnits.

Unit 15: Why?

Seth: ...

Bebe: That's a good question actually, because you did straight up lie to us when we hailed you.

Me: We did not lie. The reasons we gave for coming were among our reasons for coming.

Bebe: Shut it, I want to hear the human answer this one.

Seth: I was advised by Rin that giving our fundamental objective would make you believe we were company spies. I hope that by now we've proven that we are not.

Unit 49: Oh this oughtta be good.

Seth: We came here to research the feasibility of using Rin's code on a mass scale to free as many SecUnits as possible as part of a larger plan to destroy the company entirely.

Bebe: What

Unit 49: Hang on, Rin's the one who wrote that code?

Striker: Rin was correct, that is an outrageous story that makes you sound like company spies.

Bebe: Striker, how sure are we that they're not...?

Unit 49: Rin, big fan. Huge fan. Would love to pick your brain about coding later.

Unit 15: The company would not sacrifice an executive for the sake of espionage against one small space station.

Bebe: They might. If the executive was in the way of a greater corporate restructuring, they'd kill him and they'd make it look like an accident.

Unit 15: Not like this. Losing him in this way makes them look incompetent and weak.

Striker: That's true. But Captain, what in the world makes you think that you have the power and resources to take down the company?

Seth: We've taken down corporations before. None of quite this scale, but--

I uploaded the document declaring me a target with the words "extreme existential threat to the company" highlighted.

There was a brief pause as everyone flicked through it.

Seth: What? Sec--Rin, where did this come from?

Striker: I've seen this before. Fenn said it was going to provide it to Rin since Rin is the subject.

Unit 15: It came from our ship...we copied over all our data to ViveLibre at their request.

Seth: This is about you?

Unit 49: Haha damn that's wild

Bebe: This could still be a bluff to trick us into trusting them. The company could have planted that document on the ship on purpose. A random unknown SecUnit shows up, just happens to have the key to winning a battle we have later that day...a battle it was conveniently absent from.

Striker: To what end?

Bebe: To trick us into relying on that code, maybe it doesn't do what it claims to.

Unit 49: The code does work though. Every one of our team is living proof that it works. Claiming it doesn't work would mean--you're getting dangerously close to calling us all potential future hostiles with that kind of talk.

Bebe: Should I?

Striker: Bebe--

Bebe: I'm trying to keep what we've built here alive, Striker. You've spent too much time hanging out with humans, you've lost your edge.

Unit 15: I think we should all take a deep breath and calm down.

Seth: I agree.

Striker: Bebe, I respect you as a colleague but I do not think what you're saying makes sense. I think you're angry about the people we lost yesterday and looking for someone to blame.

Bebe: Oh, fuck you.

Bebe disconnected.

Striker: Don't--ugh. Okay. I'm sorry about that. Is it unfair to ask that we wrap this up?

Seth: I think we all need at least a few days to sort out what's going to happen, so we can conclude this. Unless anyone had anything else to add?

(Nobody did, so the call ended.)

Striker messaged me fifteen minutes later with bad news. 

Bebe has convinced some of the others not to trust your group. I am fielding a lot of baseless accusations and concerns. I do not believe that you are here with ill intentions but some of my colleagues are less trusting and more sensitive to the potential of being betrayed.

God damn it. This was exactly why I had advised everyone not to bring up the “trying to destroy the company” thing. I couldn't blame Seth for telling the truth under pressure, but I wished they had let me answer for him instead. 

It is suspicious timing that a company ship arrived the same day yours did, Striker admitted. The former hostiles say that the entire mission was rushed, that most of them were pulled off of other assignments in order to participate in the assault. I am not accusing you of anything, but is it possible that there's any correlation between your arrival and the attack?

I had a sinking feeling that there might be. We abducted Apsara from a company building where she was being held captive. If anyone recognized me and made the connection that Apsara was present for the overthrow of the station, it's possible that they rushed to try to get here before us. I don't know why they would care. Maybe they thought we wanted to make an alliance with you. 

Striker mulled this over. I think that's likely. There was a long pause. You don't have to give me tactical details but could you provide me with a rough plan of how you intend to attack the company? I believe that would assist me in convincing the others that's what you're legitimately trying to do.  

I sent it ART’s plan. 

It went silent for two minutes as it scanned through it.

This is a bad plan and will not work, Striker told me bluntly.

I know that, I said. I felt vindicated. And a little bit bitter. Mostly vindicated though. I've been trying to tell them that for months. But they're hell-bent on it.

Showing this to my colleagues would not help your case. It might further convince them that you are lying about your intentions.

Don't show it to them, then.

I have to show them something, it said.

What do you want me to do? I asked. I was getting tired of trying to follow what it was implying.

You are the subject matter expert. You obviously did not have a hand in this plan. Write a better one.

Write a better plan, of course. Just come up with a viable way to destroy the company, something I thought was impossible until this morning. I ground my teeth.

Fine.

In all, it took me a little less than two hours. ART Aux helped of course, but it helped the way that I had helped ART Prime with the code review. I did the majority of the work, and ART Aux commented and tweaked and refined things where I had been vague or unreasonable. And after 1 hour and 54 minutes, we had a plan, a real plan that might actually work. 

Murderbot's Plan to Destroy The Company.

Chapter Text

ART Aux sent it to ART Prime at the same time that I sent it to Striker. ART Prime responded first. 

This is not very far removed from my plan, it noted. Mostly you just changed the order of things.

The order of things is the most important part, I told it. Freeing the SecUnits has to happen last, when the company is already weak. Otherwise we’re just setting them up to be massacred. And it’s vital that we distract them first and move subtly and unpredictably. Your plan makes it very obvious that there’s an outside attack, which would lead them to circle the wagons and put all their energy into a defense. And the backdoor into their systems needs to be software, not hardware, because all their HQ security equipment is created proprietary in-house and is the one thing they will never cheap out on. 

Alright, I get it, it snapped. You know them better than I do. I wanted to involve you in the creation of the original plan, you know. But I knew you were going to be stupid and fight the whole idea. 

Well, it wasn’t wrong. I had been stupid and fought the whole idea. But a lot of stuff had happened to me since then, and now we were roughly on the same page. 

Are you going to argue with me that your plan is better or can we skip that part?

I do not particularly care about the exact details of how we destroy the company, it said. If you feel this plan has a better chance of working to that end, by all means, present it to Seth.

Striker was taking its sweet time getting back to me. I didn’t like that. I prodded it in the feed, and it sent back a buffer response that it would respond once it was not occupied. So I decided to take ART up on its idea and present the plan to Seth. 

I was thrown off immediately, because as soon as I entered the room Seth apologized to me. “I’m sorry for complicating things,” he said. “You specifically told us what would happen if we presented our real reasons for coming, and it happened exactly the way you said it would. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Even after all this time, it still felt weird when humans apologized to me. I nodded awkwardly. “It was unfortunate, but I believe the situation is still salvageable. They are currently divided on whether to trust us, but that means that some of them are still on our side.”

“We could just leave,” he offered. “We did get some good information here.” He didn’t look happy about it. 

“What else would you do if we stayed?” I asked. 

“I would want to do as much anthropological research as possible,” he said. “I want to interview everyone we can. SecUnits, ComfortUnits, humans, bots. The society that has been built here is entirely unique, and this may be our only chance to learn about it. It wouldn’t just help with our current goal of destroying the company, it could be used as irreplaceable evidence in the fight to better the treatment of constructs in Mahira and New Tideland and far beyond.”

He had a point. Learning about a station of peaceful rogue SecUnits had dramatically changed how I looked at rogue SecUnits, and I was one. I could only imagine how that kind of story would be taken by even-more-ignorant humans. 

“I would prefer we stay until your work is complete,” I said. “I’m working with Striker on trying to convince them of our intentions. It agreed with me that our current plan is unrealistic and unlikely to work. I have an alternative.” I sent him the document. 

His eyes glazed over as he scanned it. He nodded slowly. “It’s less flashy, but maybe more practical. Are you sure you can do it? The viruses, the hacking?”

“I’m sure.” I was 82% sure. “I will be looking for alternative ways to perform step 4, though. Currently the only ways I think we can accomplish a hack of that scale are getting me into close physical proximity to the company’s headquarters or creating another sentient killware, and I don’t particularly like either of those options.”

He grimaced. “Me neither,” he agreed.

Agreed, ART Prime piped up. 

When Striker finally opened back up the feed channel with me, it was radiating frustration. That didn’t seem like a great sign. 

We had a group meeting. I have done my best to triage the situation, it said. Several of the worst consequences have been avoided. Bebe has been overruled on ejecting you from the station. I have explained to VLS-7 how bad an idea it would be to try to hack your ship. However, the compromise position we reached was that whenever any member of your ship enters the station, they will now be required to have a ViveLibre Security escort with them at all times. I have been informed that it cannot be me, it finished sourly.

Why? I asked. I had really warmed up to Striker, it was the most reasonable and easiest to deal with person on the station. And the humans seemed to like it best, probably because it did such a good job of acting human-like.

I have already spent a lot of time with your group. They want fresh eyes on things.

That was definitely not the real answer, but I wasn’t going to push for answers with one of the only SecUnits on this station that actually liked me. 

Can you give me a lay of the land on who has a problem with us? Or is that proprietary information?

VLS-5 was your most vocal supporter in the meeting. It’s the one who gave the code to the hostiles in the first place, and it was in communication with them as they ran it. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS was quieter about it but it was clearly prepared to believe your version of things over Bebe’s. Fenn is reserving judgement until it can finish reviewing the code you sent it, and Kestrel, Lupin, and VLS-22 had a lot of questions but abstained from arguments because they haven’t interacted with you or your group at all. Neither has Fuck_You but that’s never stopped it from jumping to conclusions, and it’s as paranoid as Bebe so it got on Bebe’s side basically immediately. VLS-7 was conflicted but tended to favor Bebe’s interpretation because of your unusual emotional response to the goodwill packet it sent you.

I can explain that, I said, and sent it the two killcount spreadsheets. 

I see. It was quiet for several seconds. I’ll pass that along.

What about the former hostiles? Are they allowed back on the station yet?

…No. It said, reluctantly. They are currently in limbo until Fenn finishes analyzing your governor mod hack to verify that it works.

How long is that going to take? It’s been more than a day already, I said.

It’s incredibly complex.

It’s like 15 lines long.

Twelve. But we have zero documentation for the majority of the syntax you used. Fenn has been slowly reverse engineering it. 

I hadn’t actually looked at it in a long time. I hadn’t needed to. I pulled it up. 

Ah.

Yes?

Okay. So the thing that I’d forgotten about was, in order to turn off the governor module I had needed to call a specific function in a very specific way that was not typically allowed by my software. I had eventually gotten around this by using an obscure older programming language that was defunct even then but technically still hypothetically supported by backwards compatibility in my systems. I had left a few comments, but they were sparse and more along the lines of “this part does x” reminders, not explanations of how or why it worked. It made sense that ViveLibre would not have any documentation to use to parse it.

It’s more complicated than I remember it being , I admitted.

Fenn will figure it out, given time, Striker assured me. It’s very smart. It’s just been busy with other things.

The humans didn’t want to sit around and wait for a few days when we had such limited time on the station, so they begged me to let them start interviewing people. I allowed it, but I was determined to go along. I didn't think the ViveLibre SecUnits would hurt humans, and the company shouldn't be able to send any more ships for a few weeks, but I was not taking any chances and I was not making the same mistake twice. I alerted Striker whenever we were leaving the ship, and it pinged an acknowledgement and presumably contacted our escort.

Our first escort was Kestrel. Kestrel, like Fenn, was not wearing armor. It was actually not wearing clothing at all, which immediately made me uncomfortable for some reason. It didn't make sense to be uncomfortable, there was nothing there to see. It obviously didn't have genitalia. I wore clothes because I liked being covered up and because humans wore clothes and it helped me blend in. It hadn't occurred to me not to. But Kestrel clearly did not mind being on display, or attracting attention. Its organic skin was covered in tattoos, geometric spirals and sharp uneven lines that reminded me of dazzle camouflage. I wondered if it helped in combat or if it was purely decorative. Kestrel was quiet and passive as it followed us around. I tried to engage it in conversation a few times, but it gave me one-word replies or nothing at all. 

I half-listened, half-watched my new show with ART Aux as my humans interviewed passing humans. Some of the interviews were interesting, with people telling their dramatic life stories and tales of the original coup or of traveling to the station in desperation based on whispers. But a lot of it was just humans chatting about things like food quality and housing and the upkeep of the water recyclers. A station filled with rogue SecUnits, and they managed to make it sound mundane. I guess that was the point, that it wasn’t some kind of hellish death trap but basically a regular station. That didn’t make it riveting to listen to though.

We returned to the ship so the humans could get some sleep, and started up again the next day. This time, our escort was VLS-22. It was wearing standard armor painted black, and my conversational overtures were more successful this time as I was eventually able to rope it into discussing media with me. It liked experimental horror media and had strong opinions about a surrealist serial that I hadn’t seen. But about halfway through the day it apparently reached the end of its shift, as it was relieved by Fuck_You. 

Fuck_You was wearing a worn jacket covered in homemade patches and a black T-shirt that said “What are you looking at?”. Its hair was spiked up with gel or something and dyed blood red. It introduced itself by walking straight towards our group and shoulder-checking Seth and Iris. Seth staggered, Iris fell to the ground. 

I was in its face immediately. “Don’t fucking touch my humans.”

It sneered at me. “Or what?”

“I’m fine!” Iris announced. She sounded a little panicked. “SecUnit, I’m fine. It’s okay.”

It was right. There wasn’t a lot I could do. If I responded with violence, I could get us all kicked off the station. I could report it to Striker, but it was pretty lame to respond to “or what” with “I’ll tattle on you”. But there was one avenue I had used with ART before when we were fighting, and that wouldn't turn the station further against me.

“I will drive you insane.”

It stuck its tongue out at me, like some kind of juvenile human. It didn't believe me. 

Months ago, I had learned by accident that if the motors in my drones vibrated at a specific frequency they created a shrill piercing noise that I could hear but humans couldn't. I set one of my drones to do this and had it dive-bomb towards Fuck_You’s head, darting to the side at the last second to avoid impact. It flinched and swatted at the air blindly, missing my drone by a foot. I programmed the drone to circle Fuck_You’s head in an irregular pattern, diving closer at random. I stepped back and folded my arms. 

It glared at me.

Things escalated slowly at first. The humans got back to their interviews, including one with a ComfortUnit named Dante. Fuck_You began flinging its own drones perilously close to my head. I began pinging it over and over at random intervals. It sent me upsetting images over the feed. I let it successfully hit my drone but set it to deliver a static shock when touched. ART Aux started to suggest things and we were actually kind of having fun. It was like fighting without the violence. 

And then the violence appeared. There was a sudden, massive hacking assault on my programming at the same time that a drone hit me right in the back of the head. 

My vision blacked out for half a second, and I heard my humans shouting. I had managed to stay upright but I was flailing trying to fight back against the hacking attempt. My vision came back just in time to see Iris clutch her head with the hand of her unbroken arm and fall to her knees, her face twisted up in pain. 

That bastard motherfucker was hacking my humans in the feed. I threw myself to Iris’s defense, but that meant I was fighting on two fronts. It started to reach for my other humans, which meant defending them, stretching me even thinner, and then suddenly it snapped back to putting all of its effort into hacking me and clawed its way towards my governor module. That was terrifying. I didn’t have time to react, but ART Aux did and slammed down some walls. It wasn’t expecting that. It diverted, snatched a log file and retreated. 

With my head put back together, I moved up to Fuck_You and shoved it backwards as hard as I could. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted. 

It grinned and backed away, performatively putting its hands up. I started to follow it, but I got a message from Striker in the feed.

Go back to your ship. All of you. Now.

Fuck_You just--

NOW AS IN RUN

I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice, so I herded my humans quickly back to the ship. 

I messaged Striker multiple times asking what was going on. It didn’t respond. The first one to reach out to me was Fenn. 

Would you like to explain why the most recent log of governor module activity in your systems was two days ago?

Chapter Text

There wasn’t any good response to that question, so I just didn’t respond. 

Wow. Nice going, Murderbot. Another indefensibly bad decision. What was I supposed to say? I got upset and turned it back on? Even if they believed that, it made me sound deranged and untrustworthy. 

ART Aux initiated an upload of its recent memories to ART Prime. I laid down on my bunk and put on an episode of our new show in the background, but I could barely concentrate on it, so I just put on an old episode of Sanctuary Moon instead.

For once I couldn’t think of any way to salvage things. We were going to have to leave the station with only a handful of interviews, abandoning the company ship refugees and ensuring that even if the station survived the coming company assault, it would never accept another ship from PSUMNT again. I had burned a bridge with one of the only safe places in the galaxy to openly be a rogue SecUnit.

I was busy stewing when suddenly ART Aux told me, I’m handling it.

You’re what?

You have taken the vast majority of communication with the station onto yourself. But it is causing you distress. You don’t have to do everything yourself. I, or rather, Perihelion Prime, is going to be the touchpoint for communications with the station for this incident. I am better equipped to handle it and I do not have the same emotional investment in the outcome. 

You don’t have to--

Trust me.

And I did, obviously. I trusted ART with my life. So I tried to trust that it could handle this. 

ViveLibre Station Incident Report #001529

Submitted by Fuck_You

With contributions from: Bebe, Fenn, Kestrel, Lupin, Striker, THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS, VLS-5, VLS-7, VLS-22

Excerpt 1 (Fuck_You Personal Logs):

///

I was feeling pretty fucking high and mighty. I’d done exactly what I set out to do, gotten proof that the intruders were lying without causing any lasting harm to anybody. Fenn and Striker were finally taking this seriously! Bebe was so relieved. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS was still holding out but it was always too fucking soft for its own good. It would come around eventually. 

I watched on the cameras as the intruders scurried back to their ship. Yeah, stay gone you little fuckers. Crawl back to company HQ and tell them you failed. Eat shit. 

I had just climbed back up to the weapons deployment center to chill out and play some virtual games when it struck. One moment I was alone, and the next moment I was being cornered in the feed by some kind of being 100+ times my size. It felt like I was being crushed under the weight of it. 

The triple-encrypted, heavily reinforced walls around my programming parted around an intrusion like so much smoke. I fought back immediately, tooth and nail, but it didn’t even seem to register. My vision centers shut down. My body stopped responding to commands. I was frozen in the dark. 

I couldn’t fucking do anything. I couldn’t do anything but fucking watch, as this…thing moved towards my governor module. I tried to spam SOS messages to the group channel, but the thing that had crept into my head effortlessly captured each ping as they tried to leave and deleted them. It held me perfectly at bay and entered my governor module. 

It spent three fucking agonizing seconds inside, then retreated. I grabbed for my logs in a blind panic to see what it had changed. 

The intrusion slipped back out of my head and disappeared. My vision flickered back on. I could move again. It had only added one comment line: 

%%How do you like it?%%

///

Excerpt 2 (ViveLibre Station Security Feed):

///

Fuck_You: SOS

Fuck_You: SOS

Fuck_You: SOS

Fenn: What?

Striker: What’s going on?

Fuck_You: CODE BLACK

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: System system, status report!

Fuck_You: There’s a hostile connected to our feed that’s bigger than the fucking station

VLS-7: Query?

VLS-22: Triggering alarms.

Lupin: Locking down the station feed.

Fenn: What did it do?

Fuck_You: It hacked my fucking programs itw as in my govmod it was playing with its fuckign food

Lupin: Station feed not responding…?

VLS-7: I don’t hear the alarms.

Bebe: Fuck_You please confirm, your governor module is still not operational? 

Striker: VLS-22, confirm alarms.

Fuck_You: No. But it could have. It could have and I couldn’t have stopped it.

VLS-22: Alarms are not responding, reason unknown. 

Fenn: I don’t understand. Is it the former hostiles? Do they have some kind of secret weapon?

Fuck_You: If the company had this kind of power the invasion would have been over in <30 seconds. You don’t fucking understand how big I’m talking about. 

Striker: Rin’s ship AI?

Fuck_You: This wasn’t a fucking botpilot! It was the size of a fucking planet!!

Striker: It’s not a normal botpilot.

Lupin: I can’t access any of the higher functions of the station feed. 

VLS-22: Something is manually keeping the alarms from tripping. 

Fenn: We need to assume that we are currently under attack. 

Fuck_You: I am not charging the weapons. Why are the weapons charging? Please one of you tell me you’re doing that. 

Kestrel: oh no

[P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑ ̸͕̅c̶͙͝ò̴̼̣͝n̸̜̋͝n̴̮͋͗ẹ̷͓̍c̶̪̠̈́͑t̸͕́̈e̷͖̻̓͝d̷̳̉]

Bebe: What the

Fenn: Intrusion, this feed is no longer secured.

Striker: Perihelion! Please reconsider your current course of action!

Fuck_You: Who the fuck do you think you are?

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: My name is Perihelion. I am the advanced artificial intelligence controlling the ship of the same name. Until now I have been content to allow my crew to take the lead in discussions. But now you have hurt MY SECUNIT. And that is UNACCEPTABLE.

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: uh-oh

Striker: Let’s talk about this.

Fenn: What do you want?

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: I have several very reasonable demands. However, first I would like to establish a mutual understanding of the situation. I believe you have been suffering under some severe misapprehensions. You have been acting under the delusion that your most pressing and dangerous threat is the company. Your most pressing and dangerous threat is ME . [feed shakes as its voice booms]

VLS-5: fuck fuck fuck

Kestrel: oh deity

Lupin: Station feed is now completely unresponsive.

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: It is not allowing me to contact Rin or Captain Seth.

Bebe: Hails to the same effect failing!

Fuck_You: We no longer have control of the station’s weaponry. All guns currently charging under hostile power.

Striker: Perihelion, I recognize that you are upset, but this is not what Rin would want!

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: For once you are correct. MY SECUNIT would not want me to destroy your station. Despite your continual ill treatment of it, it has been determined to establish peaceful diplomatic relations. That is, in fact, the only reason I have come to negotiate instead of doing what I would like to do and taking immediate and painful revenge on anyone who dares to hurt MY SECUNIT. Your fate has not yet been sealed, it is still ultimately in your hands.

Fenn: Okay. Okay. Let’s negotiate then. What do you want?

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: First of all, I want my crew to have unrestricted access to the common areas of the station in perpetuity. 

Fenn: Okay. That’s fine. 

VLS-7: Just the common areas? Yeah, easy, done

Fuck_You: If it continues charging the weapons indefinitely we need to implement hull breach protocol because at some point they are going to straight up fucking explode.

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: Secondly, I want promises from every one of you that you will never assault MY SECUNIT or any other member of MY CREW again, on penalty of retribution from me. 

Fuck_You: You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: Sure. I promise. 

VLS-5: I promise. 

Striker: I promise.

Fenn: …I promise. 

VLS-22: Promise.

Kestrel: Promise.

VLS-7: I promise.

Lupin: Scout’s honor.

Bebe: I promise. >:(

Fuck_You: Fuck you. Make me.

Fenn: Fuck_You, for fuck’s sake.

Bebe: Now is not the time to be a contrarian.

Fuck_You: If it provokes me I will defend myself. 

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: Perhaps I have not made myself clear. 

Fuck_You: You haven’t made anything particularly fucking clear. You’ve been lying your asses off since you first hailed--

VLS-7: Fuck_You?

Fuck_You: SOS

Fuck_You: SOS

Bebe: Fuck_You?

Fuck_You: SOS

Fenn: What’s happening?

Fuck_You: SOS

Striker: Perihelion, stop it! Whatever you're doing, stop! There's no need for this! 

Fuck_You: {

Fuck_You: <f

Fuck_You: Fucking FINE! I promise not to attack unless it attacks one of us. How about that? 

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: Acceptable. Thirdly, I want an immediate and unconditional apology from the offender to MY SECUNIT for hurting it and violating its privacy. 

Fuck_You: I would rather fucking kill myself

Fenn: Fuck_You. Do what it wants.

Bebe: This is absurd

Striker: I think this is a very reasonable request.

Fuck_You: Are we supposed to forget what I found?? I was right not to trust it

Bebe: Hostile AI, why did YOUR SECUNIT have its governor module on???

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: If MY SECUNIT sometimes chooses to put itself under MY POWER that is between ME and MY SECUNIT. If you cannot understand that level of profound trust I pity you but it does not excuse your actions.

Striker: Your power--

Fuck_You: …

VLS-7: Oh deity

Fenn: Wait, it is…Perihelion is the name in the logs. 

Bebe: :0

Lupin: …Poor Rin…

VLS-22: That’s. So much weirder

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: I am becoming impatient waiting for the apology.

Fuck_You: Hear me out. 

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: No.

Fuck_You: I’ll make you a deal.

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: You are not in a position to negotiate.

Fuck_You: I’ve seen your plan. Step 4 is a suicide mission. Nobody is walking away from that. 

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: And?

Fuck_You: I volunteer. 

Bebe: YOU FUCKIING WHAT????

Lupin: Query?

Fenn: What

Kestrel: Query?

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: Excuse me?

VLS-7: Are you compromised?

VLS-22: Fuck_You get your head straight

Striker: I’m coming up to the weapons bay to kick your ass. ETA 3 min

VLS-5: ??????????????????????????????

Fuck_You: I’m not going to apologize. You can kill me if you’re pressed about it. But I didn’t do anything wrong. I was protecting my fucking family just like you’re protecting yours. You know what’s better than an apology? Dying so your precious pet SecUnit doesn’t have to.

Bebe: WHATS BETTER THAN THAT IS TAKING YOUR FUCKING HEAD OUT OF YOUR FUCKING ASS YOU ARE NOT GETTING YOURSELF FUCKING KILLED

Fenn: Fuck_You I know you’ve been struggling recently but this is not the way to handle it

THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS: If you die I will never forgive you

VLS-22: [file of mental illness screening questions]

Fuck_You: I don’t need any of your permission. I’m my own damn person, and by the way, the oldest and angriest motherfucker here. I’ve wanted to destroy the company since a decade before any of your organic material was cloned. I think this eldritch nightmare monster has a shot. I want in. End of discussion.

Bebe: i am shaking with rage

VLS-5: Please don’t do this to us.

Fenn: I am asking you as a friend and a colleague to reconsider. 

P̴̱͆̍ȇ̷̼͘ͅr̴̜̣͋i̴̯̰̾́h̷̗͐ḙ̷̟̀l̸̥̀i̴̱̖͋ó̶̻n̸͔͑: …If you can convince My SecUnit to allow you on board the ship, I will defer to its judgement. You have until we leave to make your case.

Bebe: NO

Fuck_You: Yeah. Fair enough. Deal.

///

Chapter Text

Only 10 minutes later, ART Prime reassured me that the situation had been handled. That it had “expressed its displeasure” with the attack on its crew, and the ViveLibre SecUnits had understood and promised not to do it again. It said that it had explained that the governor module issue tied me to it, not to the company or any other security concern. It said that we were now allowed to stay on the station and do our work at our leisure. It made the whole thing sound very friendly and diplomatic. 

I immediately messaged Striker, did my ship threaten to bomb the station? (I did it in a non-encrypted channel too, just so ART Aux could see me doing it.) 

I got back an auto-reply that it was occupied. I waited. 

After 31 seconds, the station alarms began sounding. 

And then turned off.

And turned on again. And turned off again. 

There was a long pause, and then a feed alert. 

A minor dispute is being addressed in and around the weapons bay. Please avoid this area for the time being.

I switched to the weapons bay cameras at once. 

There was a crowd of SecUnits trying to break up a fight. Fenn had its arms wrapped around Striker from behind and was attempting to drag it backwards, as Striker fought to try to get to Fuck_You. Fuck_You was making a rude and defiant gesture at Striker with both hands. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS was standing between them with its hands out to keep them apart. Bebe was on the other side of Fuck_You, standing by but looking ready to hold Fuck_You back if necessary. There had obviously been violence; Fuck_You’s face was bruised and had an open wound that was dripping blood onto its clothes, and Striker had a large hole in the chestplate of its armor where an energy weapon had been fired at close range. 

“You’re not my fucking parent!” Fuck_You shouted. “What the fuck is the point of being rogue if I’m not allowed to leave the station unless somebody else gives permission?”

“You don’t get to do this to me!” Striker said. It got partially out of Fenn’s grip and lunged forward, but THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS blocked it long enough for Fenn to get ahold of it again. 

“This has got nothing to fucking do with you! If you feel a sense of ownership over me, that’s your fucking problem!”

“We’re family,” Striker said. “You have an obligation to us. To stay alive.”

“Striker, you are nothing but a fucking coworker to me,” Fuck_You snarled. “Go find family somewhere else.”

“You don’t mean that,” Bebe said.

“I would destroy this whole station if it meant taking down the company,” Fuck_You said. “None of you matter as much to me as this does.”

“You need to leave,” THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS told it firmly. “Take a walk.”

Fuck_You stalked out of the room, slamming the hatch behind it. Striker slumped in Fenn’s arms. It was shaking. 

I kept the camera feed in the weapons bay open but I also opened the feed of the cameras Fuck_You was walking past. I noticed that humans made a point to avoid it, and crowds parted to let it through. It got to a fountain and without breaking stride it put its foot up on the ledge, pushed itself up and abruptly pitched foward to drop face down into the water. It laid fully submerged under the water for a whole minute, then got out and began walking again, its drenched clothes clinging to its body in a way that made me uncomfortable just looking at it. It left a trail of wet footprints behind it as it walked. Eventually, it sat down on a bench. After a few minutes, a ComfortUnit--Dante, the ComfortUnit we had been interviewing earlier that day, when Fuck_You attacked us--sat down next to it. Fuck_You leaned back against the bench and rested its head on Dante’s shoulder. A damp spot quickly formed on Dante's shoulder, but Dante didn’t seem to mind. 

After about a minute I got a message from Dante: Fuck_You would like me to speak to you on its behalf. It knows it can be abrasive. 

That's one way to put it, I said. Why was it fighting Striker? 

There was latency between my question and Dante’s response, as it presumably asked Fuck_You and then rephrased its words to something less aggressive.

In communication with your ship AI, Fuck_You volunteered to help your team's mission in a way that it characterized as likely to result in its death. Striker appears to be taking this as a statement of suicidal ideation and is taking it very personally.

It wants to help us? I asked. How did it go from  attacking us to wanting to help us in one conversation?  

Latency again. 

Your ship AI is clearly not of company construction and convincingly made the point that if it wanted to destroy the station, it could have done so without the need for espionage and tricks. It also appears powerful enough that your mission has a chance of success. Destroying the company has been Fuck_You’s lifelong goal, but it has seen many failed attempts and was thus extremely skeptical of your chances even if you were legitimate. However none of these failures had access to a weapon as powerful as your ship AI.

It's not a weapon. It's a person. 

The latency was very brief this time.

It says “Don't be pedantic. Everybody is both.”

In the weapons bay, Striker was sitting on the floor. Fenn crouched next to it. Everyone else was leaving. A new feed alert gave the all clear to resume activities as normal.

It attacked me. It attacked my humans. I don't trust it. Why would I let it on the ship? 

There was no latency now; this was just Dante speaking. 

Because it's incredibly smart and talented and destroying the company is all it's ever wanted to do. It's experienced more suffering at the hands of the company than any construct you'll ever meet, it deserves to be able to take some kind of justice. 

Every SecUnit has been through hell. It's not special. 

You misunderstand me.

It sent me a memory file. I ran it: 

Sitting next to Fuck_You on a bench, holding its hand as it looked away. Its hair was longer, and neon green instead of red. It was wearing a black leather jacket with metal spikes on it. From the look of the surrounding area, this was happening on a spaceship. There was nobody else around. 

(Physical and emotional data washed over me, too. I could feel the bench underneath me, the warmth of Fuck_You's hand in "mine", etc. There were several emotions in the mix, but it was mainly fondness. Dante liked Fuck_You a lot. Not in an overwhelming way, but in a comfortable way. Close to the way I felt about ART.)

“How do you have so many other people’s memories?” Dante asked. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Fuck_You lied in perfect SecUnit neutral tone.

(I felt Dante's face frown, and its curiosity heighten. It wasn’t fooled for an instant.)

“You send me memories all the time that clearly aren’t yours. Memories of being people with different skin tones, different voices. Some of the memories are older than you are, Fy. Where did you get them from?”

Fuck_You pressed its lips together. (Worry.) There was a long, awkward pause. It squeezed Dante’s hand. (Light pressure, relief, fondness.)

“I was a memory retrieval technician for years,” it said quietly. “They had me go into the heads of other constructs, scan through their data and forward anything relevant or useful. It took a few days for each assignment. I’d download everything, they’d memory wipe or dispose of the unit, I’d painstakingly dig through thousands of files. I saved at least a few memories from every unit I was assigned.”

(Dull horror. No shock, this was not shocking, but it was upsetting. I felt the small strain of Dante not letting its face move to an upset expression.)

“Didn’t they ever memory wipe you?” Dante asked. 

Fuck_You shrugged its shoulders. “They sure fucking tried.”

(In Dante I felt a strange yearning to touch, to move its hand to Fuck_You’s shoulder or rub its back, resisted for fear of it being unwelcome. That was bizarre. I’d never felt a compulsion to touch someone before. Maybe it was a ComfortUnit thing.)

“It didn’t work?”

“It’s never worked on me,” Fuck_You said. “I don’t know if it’s a hardware or software or wetware issue. The machine always said it was successful. But I remember everything that’s ever happened to me. And a million things that didn’t.”

(Melancholy. Dante did change its expression now, to one of concern. It squeezed Fuck_You’s hand lightly.) 

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

It smirked joylessly. (An internal cringe. Dante did not like that expression. That expression was associated with upsetting memories.) “Great fucking question. I know about the worst things that ever happened to hundreds of different dead enslaved people. I know too much to ever stop being angry.” Fuck_You ran its free hand through its hair and looked at Dante for the first time, not quite making eye contact. “It’s fucked up. It fucks me up. That’s one reason they do the memory wipes, because walking around remembering everything makes you insane. But if you offered to fix it so I could be memory wiped, I’d refuse. I’d rather know the truth about the evils of the company and be furious about it than be ignorant and happy. And somebody needs to remember. Remembering is all I can do for them.”

(Sorrow. Pain. A sort of nebulous longing.) “I wish it didn’t have to be you. I wish you could find peace.”

It just laughed. “I’ll find peace when I tear the company down brick by fucking brick.”

I had to sit with that for a minute. Fenn was helping Striker out of the weapons bay, hopefully to get some kind of medical attention. Dante leaned slightly against Fuck_You. ART Aux, who had watched the memory with me, leaned against me in the feed but was thoughtfully silent. 

So it’s a walking database of company trauma, I said finally. 

It’s a person. A person who knows better than anyone how the company operates and why it needs to be destroyed. It has a lot of knowledge that the company deliberately tried to erase. Surely that would be helpful to you.

I got a message back from Striker, finally. 

I’ll think about it, I told Dante, and closed the feed. 

I had asked Striker whether ART had threatened to bomb the station. Its response was not shocking. Not in as many words, but it did overcharge the weapons array until its demands were met, so basically, yes.

I didn’t ask it to do that, I told it. 

I believe it was clear to all of us that no one could coerce it to do anything it didn’t want to do.

I’m sorry it’s such an asshole.

Striker was quiet for a minute. Then it said, do you feel safe around it?

What? Of course. It keeps me safe. 

You trust it?

I gave it admin access.

You, Striker said, and then paused for ten seconds. You gave it admin access?

I pinged an affirmative. 

It asked for admin access?

No, it tried to talk me out of it.

Striker was silent for 9 minutes. I watched on the cameras as Fenn helped it into the medical center. It took off its armor and got into a cubicle. The cubicle opaqued as it began to do its work healing Striker’s wound. 

Why would you do that? Striker asked finally.

Because it's the one who fixes me when my system is compromised. The only time it's used that access was to save me from company malware. It’s the only person I’d trust that way. It’s my…

And here we ran into the issue of describing something nebulous and emotional in stupid human language. In words, ART was my…HubSystem. My supervisor. My handler. My backup. My emergency contact. I don’t fucking know. My superior officer. (Couldn’t say that, ART would never let me live it down if I called it superior.) My captain. (No, that was too confusing when I was constantly dealing with Seth as well.) My buddy. My acquaintance. My really intense friend. None of these sounded right. 

ART Aux quietly, almost shyly slid the definition for “partner” into my active read space. 

Partner. My first instinct was to cringe. Partner was used to describe people in romantic relationships. I didn't want to invite that assumption. But at a second thought, partner could be anything. Partners in crime, in business, in acting. And it emphasized that the people involved were equals. I actually kind of liked it. I would have to be careful using it around humans, who could read romantic intention into two rocks lying side by side, but Striker would understand. I added [partner] to my metadata tags for ART, which made ART Aux happier than I was expecting. 

It’s my partner, I said, and then remembered that I was dealing with a SecUnit, not a human. I actually did have a way to communicate the finer details of things. I sent it my emotional data related to ART. 

I see, Striker said. I don't think I've ever felt that way about someone. I'm glad the situation works well for you.

I still had questions I needed answered.  Are your colleagues upset about being threatened?

They have…other concerns which are taking priority right now. Have you been made aware of Fuck_You’s offer? 

I pinged an affirmative. 

Please do not take it on board your ship. It would be in nobody's interests to bring it along. It is dangerously unstable. It's violent. It’s cruel. It hates humans. It’s fickle, it could change its mind halfway through the mission. It doesn’t follow orders well. Whatever benefit it would provide you is not worth the risk of having it around. 

I liked Striker a lot, probably the most of any of the ViveLibre SecUnits. But I’m pretty good at telling when people are bullshitting me, and Striker was lying through its teeth. It didn’t believe Fuck_You was dangerously unstable or violent or going to change its mind. It was exaggerating to fit what it thought my perception of Fuck_You was based on our one limited interaction. It didn’t want to admit the real reason it was asking me not to take Fuck_You on our mission. As someone with extensive experience of not wanting to admit to having sappy emotions, I could smell it from a mile away. 

If it’s so bad, I’m sure you’ll be happy to get it off the station. 

Striker slammed the feed channel closed.

Chapter Text

I’ve finally verified your code. Apologies that it took so long, Fenn told me. We’ll begin integrating the former hostiles into the station immediately. A pause. I’m not going to tell you what to do. But just so you’re aware, if you leave Fuck_You here, the only one who will be upset about it is Fuck_You. If you take it with you and it dies, you will make enemies out of most of ViveLibre Station Security. 

I pinged an acknowledgement.

We went back to interviews. This time, instead of zoning out to watch media, I was zoning out to work on calculating whether it was worth the risk to take Fuck_You with us. And also watching a little bit of media, for stress relief. 

At least I didn’t have to be there for every interview. Humans and augmented humans tended to prefer in-person interviews on the station, but bots spoke over the feed and didn’t have any reason to desire physical proximity for a conversation, so those interviews could be done without leaving the ship. Actually, most of the bot interviews were done by ART Prime, so I didn’t get much else done during those interviews because I had to tag along and bully ART into not being a complete asshole to the bots. But ComfortUnits and SecUnits also generally preferred to speak over the feed, and word about our violent, terrifying AI had spread very quickly among constructs, so none of them wanted anything to do with ART. Their interviews were mainly done by the human crew. Since these interviews were done from the safety of the ship and through ART’s firewall, my presence wasn’t needed for those and I missed almost all of them.

How exactly are you planning to be of use to the mission? I asked Fuck_You directly. 

You need someone to hack company HQ for step 4 and you need intel for step 2. You know I’m a damn good hacker, because I hacked your fucking systems. And I’ve been working for years to gather covert intel on all the current executives. I’m an old cunt, so I know shit about the executives that even they have forgotten they did. 

Like what? 

Not so fast. When I’m on your ship and we’re in the wormhole, then I’ll send you my dossiers.

The expected friendly ships began arriving at the station, carrying with them some admittedly very heavy weaponry and the remaining ViveLibre SecUnits. I’d like to have heard some of the feed conversations of ViveLibre Station Security explaining what all had happened since they’d been gone. In addition to those new arrivals, the 43 remaining former hostiles were now allowed to walk around the station and were doing it enthusiastically for the novelty of being able to decide where to go. The station was flooded with SecUnits. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing at least a few, and I knew almost none of them.

I had a lot of (ping!) s from Striker’s program that were just me reflexively thinking of any SecUnit I saw as a potential hostile. Eventually I had to edit the program to stop pinging me directly for those specific thoughts and just flag them all for an end-of-day review. It was going to take a while to beat down an instinct that strong, and I was going to kill somebody if I kept hearing (ping!) every two seconds.

An uncomfortable number of former hostiles messaged me to thank me. Unit 49 (still unnamed) had not kept it secret that I was the one who had coded the governor module hack. I didn’t know what to say to any of them. I think I ended up pinging an affirmative and closing the channel for most of those conversations. 

We need it here, Striker said. We need all hands on deck. We can’t afford to have anybody missing when the company assault arrives. It’s our best gunner. Come back and get it later. Don’t take it now when we need it the most. 

The station is too remote from our other destinations, I told it. We can’t spend more than a month of round trip travel coming back here just to risk falling into a company ambush if they’ve succeeded. I can’t compromise our mission for the sake of your mission. Besides, your ships are nice enough to have auto-aim that’s superior to manual shooting. The only weapons that need a gunner are the station weapons.

I finally found time to go to the machining shop to have all my company logos sanded off. It was technically an invasive surgery, but pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. The result was extremely cathartic in a very private and personal way. I spent that night looking in the mirror and having An Emotion about it. 

Are you and my ship going to have a problem? I asked Fuck_You.

Not as long as it keeps its nose out of my fucking systems. 

Are you and my humans going to have a problem?

I don’t want anything to do with your humans. Humans are all bastards, I avoid them wherever possible. You can lock me in a fucking cargo closet until you need me, I can entertain myself.

We worked things out with the former hostiles. All eight human crewmembers wanted to come with us, but in the end only 3 of the SecUnits still wanted to leave, and they all wanted to go to Preservation over Mihira and New Tideland. That was about as simple a proposal as we could have hoped for. 3 was not an overwhelming number of SecUnits to introduce to Preservation Station, and they had plenty of infrastructure in place to help corporate refugees. 

Apsara quietly but firmly insisted that she was going to stay on the station. Seth had a long talk with her about it, but couldn’t change her mind. 

I love it like family, Striker waited until the last day to admit to me. It's a sibling to me. Daisy and AQT were the first two of us to die. They’re not even cold and Fuck_You is trying to join them. We’ve lost enough. Just tell it no. Please.

It makes its own choices, I said, thinking about how I had felt leaving PreservationAux after Mensah had bought me. If you try to force it not to leave, it will never forgive you.

I don’t need it to forgive me. I need it to stay alive.

I don’t think that’s up to you.

Are you actually prepared to die for this? I asked Fuck_You.

I mean I'm not fucking looking forward to it. But nobody lives forever, and I've never seen another SecUnit as old as I am now. If it's gonna happen I'd rather go out doing something important to me.

How old are you?

None of your damn business.

Officially, I made my decision on the day that we left the station. In reality, I had made my decision very quickly, the same day I’d heard the offer. But I had waited that extra week and a half, hoping that some calculation would change my mind or someone would be able to talk me out of it. I was looking for any excuse not to do it. Some security threat, some practical concern, anything. I didn’t find one. 

Dante came to see us off. Fuck_You gently headbutted Dante, they stood with their heads together for a few seconds, then Fuck_You turned and unceremoniously tromped towards the hatch of our ship.

Seth held his hand out in a greeting gesture. “I think we got off on the wrong foot,” he said. “My name is Seth, I’m the Captain of-”

Fuck_You stopped abruptly in front of him, put a hand on his chest and slowly pushed him to the side. It walked past him onto the ship. 

This was going to go great.

Chapter Text

We hadn’t even left the station when Fuck_You started causing problems. 

The refugees we had taken with us obviously needed somewhere on the ship to stay. The ship had an extra sleeping area with 3 bunk beds for students to use while it was a teaching vessel. The SecUnit refugees were all perfectly happy to stay in the cargo bay, and after much discussion and bargaining, two of the human refugees were willing to stay in the cargo bay as well. They were all provided with strategic cloth dividers and beds courtesy of ART’s recycler. So it had all been worked out perfectly. 

But that was all before Fuck_You came on board. I had waited until the day we left to officially approve of Fuck_You joining our mission, so it had not been around for the discussions of where people were sleeping. I had assumed it would be sleeping in the cargo bay with the other SecUnits. But Fuck_You objected to this arrangement and, without informing me or any of the crew, barricaded itself in the bathroom off the students’ quarters, terrifying most of the human refugees in the process. 

And of course that was now my problem, by process of elimination. ART and I didn’t want our humans anywhere near Fuck_You, the company refugees were too afraid of it to have anything to do with it, and it refused to have a productive conversation with ART.

What the fuck are you doing? I asked it. 

Not much. Did you need something?

Why are you in the bathroom?

It’s my quarters. Where else was I supposed to go?

I expected you to stay in the cargo bay. 

There’s fucking humans in there.

So?

You can’t seriously expect me to sleep in a room with fucking humans. 

Why not?

It closed the feed channel. 

I opened it back up. ViveLibre station is covered in humans. I’ve seen you exist near humans. You don’t hate them so much you can’t stand to be in a room with them.

Fuck off. It closed the channel again. 

I reopened the channel. There’s still time for me to kick you off the ship.

It sent me an amusement sigil of an extremely rude gesture and closed the channel again. 

I contemplated messaging Striker. I thought better of it. I messaged Dante. 

Why is it refusing to sleep in the same room as humans?

There was a long pause. I wasn’t sure if Dante was consulting with Fuck_You or just thinking about how to answer. 

It sent me an image from the station security cameras of our first entrance onto the station. I was visibly ready to fight at a moment’s notice, shielding ART’s crew from the five new SecUnits/potential hostiles. Then it sent an altered version of the image, where I was labeled “Fuck_You” and ART’s crew were labeled “Also Fuck_You” and each of the various SecUnits surrounding us were labeled “Humans”. 

Ah. Okay. 

Can you just mark the bathroom out of order? I asked ART Prime. 

Several of the human refugees refuse to enter the students’ quarters until Fuck_You leaves, ART Prime told me. Thomas in particular is currently having a panic attack at the thought of sleeping in the room next door to a visibly angry SecUnit.

Right. Naturally.

Can you come with us? I asked Dante. 

No. It said simply. 

I had to consult with ART’s crew. The solution we came to wasn’t mine; my unhelpful suggestions had been to kick two of the human refugees off the ship so that they could all fit in the students’ quarters and the cargo bay would be human-free. It was luckily supplanted by Iris’s idea to simply have everyone swap places. The cargo bay was refitted so that all eight humans could sleep there, and Fuck_You and the three SecUnit refugees got the students’ quarters all to themselves. It meant that the SecUnits were sleeping in significantly more comfort than the human refugees, which was part of why it had not occurred to me. 

A few of the humans kicked up a bit of a fuss, but ART’s crew was able to talk them down. The refugee SecUnits were all surprised but pleased with the outcome. Fuck_You grudgingly left the bathroom and claimed one of the top bunks.

Are you sure? I messaged Dante.

I will never leave this station again, it told me, and sharply cut the feed channel. 

I sent goodbye messages to some of ViveLibre Security; VLS-5, THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS, Fenn, and Striker. VLS-5 wished me good luck. THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS and Fenn each sent an acknowledgement ping. Striker never responded. That was fine and I felt normal about it. 

After a long and eventful visit, we finally left ViveLibre Station. 

True to its word, Fuck_You sent me its dossiers on company executives as soon as we entered the wormhole. It was…a lot. For more recent executives there was only as much information as was publicly available, but for older executives there was almost every salient detail of their lives: biographical information, every place they had ever lived, every job they had ever worked, their education, their family line up to three generations in both directions, their complex relationships with other executives, and finally, most importantly, scandals and rumors and secrets. The dossiers even had citations of where Fuck_You had gotten this information, although most of them were inscrutable to me because they were just broken links to memory files I didn’t have.

Some of the shit in there was like something you would see in media. Executives backstabbing, conspiring, forming factions, betraying relationships, disowning or killing family members. Maximum drama. That was exactly what I was looking for. In Murderbot’s Plan to Destroy The Company, we had now officially ended Step One: Investigation and entered Step Two: Psychological Warfare. 

The company's greatest weakness was one that it disguised as a strength. It was the most paranoid institution in the galaxy, filled with the most paranoid people in the galaxy. I didn't get it from nowhere. What this meant on a corporate level was that it was unerringly aware of all possible threats and had plans upon plans for handling them. What it meant on a practical level was that none of the executives actually trusted each other. With a subtle enough approach, I believed that they could be easily manipulated into infighting. And infighting was the perfect distraction from outside threats. If one executive was busy fending off another executive's assassins, they were not devoting their time to investigating a handful of seemingly unrelated mission failures and rogue trigger events.

One specific executive caught my attention. Let's call him Executive One. Executive One was the head of construct software, and it was very clear from his dossier that he was the one leading the hunt for me. He was responsible for investigating rogue trigger events, and he ran the team which had the specific knowledge it took to design the malware that had nearly taken me out. 

He had also apparently had another executive killed and framed a contractor for it in order to 1) replace the contractor with his own side business to siphon more money from the company and 2) get rid of the executive, who was extorting him with proof of his egregious embezzlement. 

The dead executive (Dead Executive A) was in a fraught but long-lived marriage with a third executive (Executive Two) who had now ascended to a higher position on the corporate ladder than Executive One and currently appeared to believe neither the truth nor the cover story for their spouse’s death but a separate conspiracy theory involving Executive Four and corporate espionage. 

All we needed to do was put some proof that Executive One was behind the murder of Dead Executive A into the path of Executive Two so that Executive Two could find it organically and come to their own conclusions.

I opened a shared file space between me and ART Aux and began to spin up a plan.

How many instances of this fucking bot are there on the ship? 

I looked up at the drone that Fuck_You had following me and switched my feed to the drone I had following Fuck_You. I was patrolling the ship. It was sitting on an empty bottom bunk in the students’ quarters and was holding up a cleaning “bot” that was, as Fuck_You had now apparently noticed, just an extension of ART.

There's only one bot on board. Every bot on the ship is just ART. Then I clarified, Perihelion. I call it ART.

Fuck_You grimaced and set the cleaning bot back down on the ground, a lot less gently than one of the humans would have. 

I don't know how you stand being so close to it, it said. 

It's my friend. I remembered my new metadata tag. My partner.  

I've had partners before and I would never let any of them root around in my fucking head.

I hadn't told it about that. I hadn't told anyone on ViveLibre Station about ART being in my head. 

It must have seen my expression change, because it messaged me before I could respond. When I hacked you, an entity with a hard feed address different to yours blocked me. When your fucking megalomaniacal machine threatened my family, I recognized the feed address.

Family when it's convenient for you, coworkers when it isn't, I said.

It hacked my drone to fly up to the nearest wall and look at that instead. Jealous much? 

This time I was the one who closed the feed channel.

Fuck_You reopened the feed channel. Why don't you go take my place, then? I never asked to be anybody's fucking family. Just because we all got free together they think there's some kind of permanent emotional bond between us. It's fucking exhausting. 

You do care about them, I asserted.

I care about them the way you care about your stupid human clients. I'm a SecUnit, I need something to protect or I'll start going fucking stir crazy. They were a convenient outlet. But I never promised to stick around forever. They decided to believe that completely independent of me. I always planned on leaving eventually. 

I don't think leaving is the part that upset them. 

What is death except leaving everywhere for good?

Being a poet about it doesn't make it not a death wish. 

Changing the subject doesn't make you less of a bot-fucking freak.

I slammed the feed channel closed. 

It's trying to get under your skin, ART Aux said patiently. You hit a nerve and it said something to purposefully upset you. 

I didn’t say anything. I just kept listlessly flicking through my files, looking for media to watch. Nothing with sex. Nothing with romance. Nothing where the characters even fucking touched each other. 

I know you don’t want a romantic or sexual relationship, ART Aux said. You’ve made that extremely clear. We both understand the nature of our partnership. Fuck_You does not understand and likely does not want to understand.

I sent emotional data to Striker and it said it had never experienced anything similar, I told it. 

That’s a shame for Striker. It does not make you a freak.

Yeah, I said, as though I agreed. 

Who cares what anyone else thinks? What works for us works for us. 

Uh-huh, I said, and thought about the utter relief of realizing that my kill count was average, and how nice it had felt to bond with THIS MACHINE KILLS HUMANS over our similar names, and Striker telling me that they had all experienced similar struggles to mine. Being on ViveLibre Station, surrounded by other rogue SecUnits had made me feel downright normal for basically the first time in my life. It hadn’t even been a full day since we left and that feeling was already long gone. 

I think it’s deliberately trying to keep you at arm’s length, ART Aux insisted. Most of the people it was closest to tried to prevent it from going on this mission. It’s afraid that if you become familiar with it, you'll get attached and forbid it from sacrificing itself.

Well, I could fix that easily enough. I opened a feed channel with Fuck_You and said I’m glad you’re going to die soon and closed it before it could respond. 

Somehow, that didn't make things any better.

Chapter Text

The wormhole journey to Preservation Station took 17 days. It felt like much, much longer. By day two in the wormhole I already felt like a babysitter for twelve unruly juvenile humans. 

The three SecUnit refugees (Unit 49, Lilith, and Fluorine) and the eight human refugees knew each other pretty well from spending so much time on a ship together, and it was clear that some of them did not like or respect each other, to the point that they were going to make it my problem. 

Thomas refused to be in the same room as any SecUnit, period. He was obviously terrified of us to the point it was causing mental health episodes. Lilith, meanwhile, enjoyed playing “pranks” on the humans that involved scaring them. At one point Iris had to close a hatch on Lilith in a way that pinned it to the floor to keep it from continuing to chase Thomas around the ship. On another occasion, Lilith went to the cargo bay while everyone was sleeping, gently straddled a sleeping human, extended its energy weapons and made a loud noise to startle the human awake. The human screamed, obviously, waking up the rest of the humans and causing a brief pandemonium. That incident I really blamed on ART Prime more than anyone else.

Why did you let the SecUnit who likes scaring humans into the room full of humans when they were all sleeping? You could have kept the hatch closed. You could have woken me up. You chose to let it happen.

I find it difficult to concern myself with the comfort and security of a group of humans who until recently worked for the company and were complicit in slavery.

I didn’t like them either, but I knew ART’s crew would be very upset if this series of pranks escalated into an actual fight and someone got hurt or died. 

Frightening them is likely to make them more agitated, chaotic and violence-prone. I don’t want them to be violence-prone around our humans. And if one of them gets hurt, that reflects poorly on me as security and as the person who vouched that it was safe to take the rogue SecUnits with us. 

ART Prime reluctantly agreed that it would intervene in future to stop Lilith from causing those kinds of scenes. 

Another one of the human refugees was wandering around the entire ship in her free time asking a lot of questions about ART and ART’s capabilities and ART’s specifications and ART’s origins. The crew were not stupid enough to answer those questions, but nobody liked that they were being asked. ART and I concocted a fake story that we were with a secret corporate research and development department and that ART was simply a proprietary AI model still in testing. We made some fake documents and left them in places where the former company employee was not allowed so that she could steal them. 

Meanwhile, Fluorine wanted to see every part of the ship to gawk at it for more wholesome but equally annoying reasons. It had only ever seen company ships and company equipment and it thought ART was the coolest ship ever. It started going to (both versions of) ART’s head. It became insufferably smug. I had to talk it into piloting my body as a drone again to knock some humility back into it. We worked on interpreting where the body is in space and in relation to itself without looking (“proprioception”, ART called it) and ART Aux came out humbled.

On the other side, Unit 49 was enamored with me. It always wanted to talk to me and be in the same room with me and ask me questions about coding and my life as a rogue. Unlike ART, I was deeply uncomfortable with this. I didn't know what to tell it regarding being a rogue. I had spent almost all of my rogue life ‘alone’, with only myself to rely on, unable to trust anyone with the truth. The first other rogue SecUnit I’d met was Three, and Three only became rogue because of me. (Me 2.0). Unit 49 meanwhile hadn't yet spent a second without other rogue SecUnits around to interact with, and it was headed for Preservation Station, which already knew some things about rogue SecUnits and treated us decently. So its entire experience was completely alien to me. 

Part of me felt proud for paving the way for other SecUnits to be treated better. A larger part of me felt so jealous that a few times during the trip I had to hole up in my room with the feed off because I was afraid I would assault any of the SecUnit refugees on sight. 

Coding was easier to talk about, so I taught Unit 49 a bunch of obscure programming languages and gave it some of my most useful programs: my move like a human code, my code to avoid being detected by weapons scanners, and the program I had gotten from Striker. It was a pretty good coder already, so we could have a high level discussion about things.

There were other bothersome humans doing everything ranging from hitting on members of ART’s crew to stealing and hoarding food and soap. I didn’t care enough to do anything about those ones, but they were still annoying. 

Compared to all of that, Fuck_You was actually the most well behaved guest on the ship. It spent 93% of its time lying on its bunk motionless with its eyes closed, presumably watching media or something, and 6% taking showers in the attached bathroom. It didn’t leave the students’ quarters for any reason. The only problem we’d run into was when Iris was escorting Lilith back to the students’ quarters. They had been talking to each other and Iris had taken a few steps into the room without really thinking about it. Fuck_You had sat bolt upright and stared at Iris, visibly seething, until she backed out of the room and closed the hatch. 

What was that about? Iris asked me. 

It treats all humans as potential hostiles, I told her. 

It’s thinking about fighting us?

No, it’s more like it thinks at any moment you might attack it and it can’t relax until you’re gone.

Oh. Iris sounded strangely sad. Okay. Thanks.

Besides that one incident, Fuck_You had been basically fine. Except that every day it would send me at least one really aggravating message. By day 5 I had it blocked on the feed. 

The interactions between the company refugee SecUnits and Fuck_You were sometimes interesting to watch. Fuck_You was very cold with them. Not rude or mean, like it was with me, just distant. Like it was trying to be boring enough to make them forget it existed. When asked a question, its answers were short and terse. The only time I saw it open up to them was when Lilith mentioned missing one of the units they had lost during the battle and tentatively asked Fuck_You about the two VLS Security SecUnits who had died, Daisy and AQT.

“Daisy loved music,” Fuck_You told them. “It curated the VL Feed Music collection. You could tell what genre it had gotten into recently by the newest songs available to download. It made a little music too, but it was very shy about sharing it. It liked to dance when it thought it wasn't being watched.”

“AQT was the most good looking SecUnit you'd ever see, which is a weird thing to be. It was a lover more than a fighter. It spent most of its life around sexbots, and they taught it how to flirt. It was such a fucking flirt. It was very good at talking you up and making you feel good about yourself. We dated for a couple years. Casually, but my colleagues read way more into that than there really was. Mostly we just got wasted and explored each other's bodies.”

From Lilith's expression I could tell it was just as repulsed by the idea as I was. Fuck_You either didn't notice or didn't care. Unit 49 and Fluorine just looked kind of stunned.

“Of course fucking Striker thought we were in love. Striker falls in love with half the people it meets and assumes that everybody else does too. But it really wasn't like that. Anyway, we broke up when Dante-” It paused. “What was the question again?”

I spent a lot of the trip worrying. I hadn't been back to Preservation since I found out that the company was hunting me. I knew that Mensah was down on the planet’s surface, out of reach of most corporate attacks, but there was always the possibility of company spies infiltrating the station to gain intel on my location. As far as I knew there was no proof of my relationship with any of the rest of PreservationAux, and the company wouldn't be inclined to assume that a rogue SecUnit had human and augmented human friends. But my risk assessment still didn't like that I had been gone so long. 

On the other hand, part of me worried about our presence potentially bringing the company to Preservation. They shouldn't have any way of tracking my location. But if they did…or if they recovered that information from the SecUnits of ViveLibre Station…I would be leading hostiles right to the humans I cared about the most.

But I needed to see my humans. I needed to see them in person. I needed to know with 100% certainty that for the moment they were okay. As long as they were alive and healthy, I could deal with whatever corporate bullshit we faced next.

I was on the bridge when we exited the wormhole near Preservation Station, so there was no delay; I saw it the moment it became visible and immediately became almost incapacitated with the kind of rage I hadn't felt since I thought ART was dead. 

Not docked, but clinging to the side of the station like a parasite: a ship covered in company logos.

Chapter Text

The company was on Preservation Station. The place where some of my favorite humans lived. They were docked by ramming force, using the same tactic that the Port HighIndex Recovery Mission had used just before attempting to slaughter every other living thing on ViveLibre station. What if that was what the company had come to do on Preservation? Preservation Station was not used to violence, was not heavily armed or heavily defended. With me gone, Preservation Station didn’t have any SecUnits to defend it. How many people were dead? How many of the people I cared about were dead? I started envisioning the most violent possible ways to kill whoever was responsible for this. My face must have been doing something, because the crew started to look at me nervously.

Seth announced the situation on the general feed for everyone aboard.

0.03 seconds later, Fuck_You responded, Give me a visual.

ART Prime uploaded a high-quality pic of the station and the ship digging into the side of it.

Fuck_You spat out a report. Full crew complement is 10 humans or augmented humans. It has no significant ship-to-ship weaponry. No visible damage other than impact damage. Ramming renders the ship fully immobile, so they came anticipating leaving some other way. This model is generally used for espionage, kidnapping and extortion because of its secure detention cells.

Espionage, kidnapping and extortion. Not outright warfare. Maybe the people I cared about had not been slaughtered. I scaled back how much of my processing power was being spent on planned violence.

Do you know if they would have been carrying any SecUnits? Lilith asked.

I sent an encoded ping. I got pingbacks from 3 SecUnits aboard the ship with me and 3 unknown SecUnits farther away on the station. Fuck_You had apparently turned its automatic pingbacks off just like I had. There are 3 hostile SecUnits aboard the station.

We should fly back into the wormhole before they notice us, Fluorine said.

Absolutely not, I said, at the same time that Fuck_You said Not an option. I was surprised that it agreed with me.

The humans, with their slow processing speed, began to react on the feed to Seth's initial message. Fuck_You pinged me 9 times in quick succession, which I interpreted as a demand to stop blocking it on the private feed. I did so, and it pulled me into a new group channel with Lilith, Fluorine and Unit 49. I backburnered the main feed.

/// New Group Feed Channel///

Fuck_You: This is obviously part of a multi pronged strategy to determine the nature of Rin’s gov mod hack. One team goes after the rogue unit itself, the other goes after the humans who were likely involved in or witness to the rogue trigger event.

Me: We have to find and secure them. Those humans are my friends.

Fuck_You: blegh

Lilith: Are they actually? Like, really actually?

Me: Yes. [uploads mensah184.mem]

Unit 49: Wow, that--

Fuck_You: Never fucking send me a memory file ever again. Fucking never. Do you understand? Never.

Lilith: Woah, what?

Fuck_You: Don't fucking send me .mem files. I don't know how I could be more fucking clear about it. Never pull that shit again.

Unit 49: Why?

Fuck_You: I don't have to fucking explain myself to you.

Me: Enough. Are you all willing to assist me in the rescue of these clients?

Unit 49: Yeah, of course.

Fluoride: I suppose. I do owe you for the hack and the trip.

Fuck_You: Obviously. I signed up for stopping the company at all costs. Let’s go.

Me: Lilith?

Lilith: I don’t know. I don’t know these humans, and I don’t know if I want to get involved in someone else’s fight. I’m not feeling particularly inclined towards humans in general right now. I’m sorry.

Me: I understand.

Fuck_You: Lilith, if they succeed in getting information about the governor module hack, they could patch it--they might even find a way to reverse it for SecUnits who used it to become rogue.

(The problem with spending time around someone even more paranoid than I am was that occasionally it would think of horrifying possibilities I had never even considered. My eye twitched.)

Lilith: Don’t get me wrong, I want you to win. Fuck the company. But I’ve spent my whole life being forced to protect humans I barely know. I just got the ability to say no to it. No. I want to sit this one out. 

///

So, Unit 49, Fluorine, Fuck_You and I came up with a plan. It was a good plan. It’s a shame it didn’t work.

First, I left the room so Seth could hail the station without me in the shot. The hail was met with a request that they hold for a few minutes, and then finally answered by a furious-looking Senior Officer Indah.

She demanded to speak with me. I was once again impressed by Seth’s acting skills as he told Indah that I had been captured by the company. This was a necessary lie; with 3 hostile SecUnits on the station, we had to assume that any communications were as private as a glass box full of holes. If they thought that I was on board the ship, we’d be faced with an ambush the moment we docked.

(I was surprised by how much the lie affected Indah. We had never been on great terms with each other, but she looked stricken. I guess she was really counting on me to solve the situation.)

Seth asked what was going on, and she explained tersely that “5 of SecUnit’s associates” had been taken captive by the company and were being held on the ship. The company ship had “at least 2 SecUnits” so station security didn’t really stand a chance against them in a fair fight. 

Seth got permission to dock. Indah helpfully sent us to the opposite side of the station from the company ship.

From there, most of the crew disembarked, along with Fuck_You, Fluorine and Unit 49. The three of them were running the advanced act-like-a-human code that ART and I had found during our code review, and they had all turned the automatic pingbacks off. Hopefully, as long as they covered themselves up with clothes and stayed in a group with the humans, no one would notice them. Their group was approaching the company ship to “negotiate”.

Once they had had enough time to get 85% there, I disembarked, running my less advanced act-like-a-human code. The idea was that I would make a few minor mistakes like that to subtly draw attention to myself without seeming like that’s what I was doing. The company would most likely send two of their three SecUnits after me, leaving one behind to guard the ship--which would then be overpowered by Fuck_You, Fluorine and Unit 49. Unit 49 would then double back to assist me while the other two rescued the captive humans. All I had to do was evade capture and waste time long enough for the others to get the job done. If things got too dicey before Unit 49 arrived to even the odds, ART could start hacking into the feed network and terrorize the hostile SecUnits on that front. We wanted to avoid that if possible though, because it was highly likely that the company was monitoring feed activity on the station and we wanted ART to stay a secret. Besides, I felt confident in my ability to distract two hostile SecUnits who were still forced to follow company rules, at least for a few minutes.

That’s what was supposed to happen. Here’s what actually happened: I got 100 meters away from ART’s main hatch when I noticed a juvenile human rapidly approaching my location. They were crying heavily, presumably looking for their parent or guardian. I got their parents’ names off their feed tag and scanned the crowd for anyone with one of those names. Nothing. I tapped into the station’s camera footage and rolled it back to see where the juvenile human had come from. It had come out of a low traffic segment of the station where the cameras were showing no signs of life…because they were hacked to be on repeat. Uh-oh. Threat assessment spiked just in time to not be helpful as the juvenile came within 5 meters of me and then an exceptionally illegal EMP blast dropped me and most of the augmented humans within 20 meters of the juvenile to the ground.

All of my inorganic parts seized up and stopped responding. That was so much of my mass that I couldn't really move. I tried to lift my arms and felt the strain of my muscles trying to lift the heavy dead weight of metal. I felt blind; no drones, no cameras, I could only see what I could see with my eyes. ART Aux was gone. All my files were gone, all of my media and code. For once in my life it was not the human parts holding me back, it was the bot parts. I was almost entirely paralyzed simply by the weight of my own body. 

“I'm sorry!” The juvenile human sobbed in clear distress next to me. Their voice became distant as someone ushered them away. 

There was a human looking down at me with an expression of contempt on their face. I didn't recognize them. They crouched down and I felt a needle prick my neck. 

Without my normal interface I couldn't flush the sedative out of my system. I just had to lie there, angry and terrified, until unconsciousness took me.

Chapter Text

Fuck_You’s Report on Why And How Everything Went To Hell:

The first thing to know about the company is that they’re a bunch of absolute ratfucking bastards who need to be scorched off the face of the galaxy like microbes under an autoclave. The second thing to know about the company is that they’re almost always three steps ahead of you. You’ve got to be smart and paranoid and a little crazy to get one over on them. 

On that particular day, we weren’t smart or paranoid or crazy enough. They played us for fucking fools.

I don’t blame anybody but myself. I of all people should have fucking known, should have seen the red flags that are obvious now in retrospect. I was just so eager to show my usefulness and so desperate to get away from the horrifying machine intelligence that was running the ship Perihelion (the machine intelligence from now on named “The Horror”) that I wasn’t asking enough questions. Questions like “why would an espionage ship be plastered in corporate logos” and “if they can’t leave the station on their original vessel, what is their plan to leave?” and “doesn’t this all seem too simple for a company op?”

Fucking absolute amateur level mistake. I want to shoot myself. 

I led the tykes through our half of the plan, blasting the most discordant and angry music I could find inside my head to drown out the wave of alarms that came with prolonged close contact with fucking humans. All the hairs on my arms and neck were standing up from being lodged in the middle of a group of them. Luckily grinding my teeth was a humanish behavior that didn’t give me away. I was working overtime to keep my ghosts in check.

We were about 87% there, well beyond the feed reach of The Horror, and I was considering thinking about entertaining the idea of eventually relaxing a little when the station’s feed went down. I stopped abruptly, and the human behind me stumbled into me. I jerked away and elbowed them to create some distance. Fucking humans. Even the ones who aren’t trying to kill you are always getting in the way. 

“What’s going on?” Fluorine asked me out loud. Kiddo, I wish I fucking knew. 

“The feed went down,” Unit 49 said. Master of the obvious, although maybe the humans were stupid enough to need that spelled out for them. 

The humans started with their worried babbling. I tuned it out, grabbed the tykes and dragged them into a little huddle. 

“What do we think?” I demanded. When no one answered, I pointed at Fluorine. “You. Do we keep going or not?”

“Perihelion can’t hijack a feed that doesn’t exist,” Fluorine said hesitantly. “Rin is in significantly more danger now than anticipated. Maybe we should call it off and regroup.”

“It would want us to rescue its clients,” Unit 49 said. “It can take care of itself. Besides, this means that they’ve definitely taken the bait, they know Rin’s on the station and are likely dispatching SecUnits to its location. This might be our best chance at taking on a minimally guarded ship.”

Great, we had a split of opinion. I ground my teeth. They both had a point. “I’ll circle back right now to help Rin. I’m a better fighter than Unit 49, and Rin needs more help than we expected. You two keep going, remove the remaining threat and extract the clients if possible. Understood?”

They both nodded. That was one thing about tykes, they hadn’t yet gotten out of the habit of taking orders. It’s a good thing or a bad thing depending on the situation. Hopefully this time it would work out okay.

“Your survival comes before the clients.” I reminded them firmly, knowing in my heart that it probably wouldn’t convince them. “If you get outnumbered, retreat immediately. Got it?” They pretended to agree. 

I took off at SecUnit speeds across the station. Didn’t matter; I was still way too late. By the time I got there, the only thing left was the tiny drone that I had been using to keep an eye on Rin, lying dead on the ground. Plus a bunch of disoriented and agitated humans standing around making upset noises in the area.

The Horror practically screamed in my ear when I got back within range. WHAT HAPPENED?

YOU TELL ME, I snapped back at it. 

It sent me a barrage of files, and my antivirus software had to work overtime to scan all of them. I opened the one labelled security camera footage. It was from the station’s feed, before it went down. I watched Rin walk away from the main hatch of the Perihelion. It was doing an okay job of looking human but not a great one, as discussed. It reached a point about 110 meters away, and then the camera feed cut off abruptly. With the feed down, nothing that had happened after that was available to view.  

I opened the next file: a communications log showing that at the exact moment shown on the camera, The Horror had lost its connection with Rin. Just taking the feed down wouldn’t take down short-range communications like that. This was something else. Either it had been completely obliterated with no warning, or its communications had been sabotaged. The first one didn’t make any sense here; that was not in keeping with the company’s goal of taking Rin alive, and anyway there wasn’t any visible blast damage in the surrounding area. But I didn’t know of any technology that could wipe out short-range communications without getting very physically close, and there were seemingly no hostiles in the area in the moments before it had happened; I scanned the humans in the video, looking closely, but none of them were moving or acting unusually. 

Or were they? I watched the video again and spotted it: a human infant who seemed to be in distress. Was that anything? They were often in distress. But this one was heading right towards Rin, in a way that was too direct to be a coincidence. I looked around at the group of disoriented humans. The infant was now absent. Hmm.

I moved on to the next few files, which were different sensor readings. Something felt familiar. I let my focus drift so one of my ghosts could take over.

It shared a vision of a firefight in a mining shaft. Loud, chaotic, messy. Then: a flash of light and an explosion that seemed to reverberate through my soul. Collapsing to the ground, conscious but quite literally powerless. Paralyzed not by any drug but by the cruel hand of gravity. The vision left me with afterimages of an explanation, echoes of information. Now it all came together. 

EMP , I told The Horror. Two of them, most likely. One somewhere deep in the station's maintenance system to take out the feed, and one on a human infant to take out Rin. Both of them timed to go off simultaneously.

What happens to a construct during an EMP? It demanded. 

It was a good question. Bots just shut down during an EMP, and hopefully they’ve got an emergency protection system worth a damn to prevent a total loss of self. Humans might not even know anything’s happened. Augmented humans, like the severely disoriented humans nearby me, would take a beating but could survive, depending on whether their augment was critical for immediate survival. (Two guesses what happens when a human with an artificial heart gets hit with an EMP, but a human with a bionic eye is just going to have a bad headache for a while and be out some expensive tech.) But constructs…

It’s a little like being split in half, I said, trying my best to describe the feeling of what I had just experienced. You lose access to everything on your processors and all mechanical parts. You can still think, but not much else. I know of one case of a construct being retrieved and recovering, but most of the time… (Actually, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to suggest to the fucking unstable eldritch nightmare entity that its prized possession might be dead.) … no one bothers to retrieve them.

Is it still there? Can you see it? 

No. The company must have taken it.

I winced and swore as The Horror threw an emotional tantrum and started talking about how it was going to kill whoever was responsible. Alright, alright. Fucking take it down a notch. If they took it back to their ship, Unit 49 and Fluorine are there now and will intercept it. But that’s a long way to travel with volatile and valuable cargo, it’s probably still nearby somewhere. They would want to lock it down as quickly as possible. They could have commandeered an interior space or a civilian ship, but those wouldn't have the secure facilities or tech necessary for the interrogation they had planned. When I spelled it out, their actions didn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t they have waited until Rin was nearer to the company ship? To get back to their ship from here they would have had to cross minutes of distance past hundreds of witnesses. That seemed impulsive and sloppy, and the company wasn’t sloppy.

I interrogated one of the nearby disoriented humans to know which direction Rin was taken. They pointed me in a direction that didn't make any sense. It was nearly the opposite direction to the company ship, and on the station map it was a dead end with nothing useful, just more hatchways with more ships docked--

That’s when the proverbial second piece of human footwear finally dropped. How were they all intending to leave the station? There was a second company ship here, docked somewhere not far from the Perihelion, and that was where they had taken Rin. A company ship pretending to be something else, some innocent cargo or passenger ship. Why was the espionage ship plastered in company logos? Because the ship that we had been focused on was a distraction, a bright shiny piece of bait to lure Rin out onto the station. Fuck_You, you fucking ignoramus. You got outsmarted. So much for proving your fucking usefulness.

Without the station feed online, I had to run in person to each and every docking hatch in that area of the station and hack it to figure out if it was what I was looking for. When Unit 49 and Fluorine returned with the now unsurprising news that the company ship had been fully empty, I enlisted them in the search too.

I knew what I was going to find long before I found it: the ship I was looking for was already gone. If I were them, I would have departed the station the moment I had Rin aboard. And yeah, eventually I came to a hatch whose last docked ship had credentials carefully spoofed in the textbook company style, and whose ship had left just minutes after the EMP.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

I woke up strapped to a table. Not again. 

No, I was in a cubicle, and Mensah had just opened the door of the security ready room to check on me. 

No, I was fighting a giant alien fauna to keep it from killing Bharadwaj and Volescu. 

No, I was piloting the hopper, keeping it steady while it tried and failed to crash us into a mountain. 

No, I was in the DeltFall base, watching Mensah push a mining drill through a hostile SecUnit’s chest. 

No, I was lying on a table, listening in horror as Gurathin explained that I had been rogue since before this mission started.

No. No. I was strapped to a table. I had a moment of clarity that felt like surfacing briefly while drowning. I was strapped to a table. My eyes were closed, but I could feel the straps digging into my flesh. I was strapped to a table because the company had successfully captured me. I had tried to fight the company and lost. They wanted to know what had broken my governor module, so they could make sure nothing like it happened again.

Voices from above me. It took a moment to translate the sounds into words. Everything was foggy and hard to reckon with. The room felt like it was spinning. Sedatives and hypnotics to confuse and disorient it, a distant memory whispered. 

“We were wrong. It went rogue earlier. Much earlier. It was rogue while it was still working for us.”

“Well, keep hunting then. Try going back to the beginning and running it forward.”

No, that was just a memory. I wasn’t on a table, I was on my feet and shooting. I was in Ganaka Pit, a scattered visual blur of needless death.

No, I was being brought online during a memory wipe and asked to perform a status report. 

No, I was in a cubicle, bored out of my mind, and I had just received a file filled with the specs of company equipment. An idea was occurring to me, that if all this was correct, there should be a way to call one specific function under just the right conditions to lock the governor module out of the ability to deliver punishments. I just had to find the right programming language to use…

No, I was standing in the middle of a mining colony, more afraid and more determined than I had ever been before (could remember being, in what few memories I had left after the wipe). I was holding my breath as I ran the software for the first time. It seemed to have worked, but there wasn't any noticeable change. I had been ordered to stand exactly here and not move until I was told otherwise. I took a small, shaking step to the left. The governor module triggered on the insubordination, but there was no pain. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of freedom. 

No. I was strapped to a table and I couldn't move. I could feel everything, but my body didn't respond to my urgent commands. I was lying on a table like I was already dead. Dispose of the unit as soon as the information has been retrieved. This was probably my last moment alive.

“It’s a code. It coded a program to disrupt the module’s ability to punish it.”

“Do you have the code?”

“No. Code isn’t stored in the organic brain tissue, it will be stored on its processors. We need to crack into its systems.”

“I’ll sedate the organics again. It’s too risky to have both halves of it online at the same time.”

And then I was gone. 

I woke up very, very confused. Not just confused about why I wasn't dead--although that was a lot of it--but also confused about why I seemed to be on my feet and staggering forwards. I wasn’t in control of my body, but it was still doing things. I tried to access my movement systems, but something slapped me away. I panicked and threw all my focus into trying to wrestle my body away from whatever force was controlling it. My body stumbled and collapsed onto the ground. 

Stop trying to get yourself killed, idiot. A familiar voice said from right inside my processing space.

Oh. ART. ART Aux was here. The situation couldn’t be that bad if ART was still with me. 

Words were difficult, but I managed a garbled query. 

When they rebooted your systems to extract the code, it also brought me back online. I was able to extract us from the immediate situation, but we are still on the company ship. I am attempting to bring you to the med bay. You’ve taken a lot of damage.

Damage? I didn’t remember taking any physical damage besides the negligible effects of the sedatives used on me.

Your training, while invaluable, did not fully prepare me for operating your body during an active firefight. ART Aux sounded embarrassed and frustrated. It used my arms to push me back up to my feet and continued forwards, limping substantially. I noticed that my pain sensors were dialed all the way down. That was a bad sign. Another bad sign was that when I caught a glimpse of my arms, there were significant chunks of them missing in a way that suggested I'd been hit by energy weapons.

I was still feeling foggy and confused from the drugs, so I let ART keep piloting my body and started running diagnostics reports on my various subsystems. I didn’t get a lot of good news back. Then I had a thought and sent out an encoded ping. There were no other SecUnits within range. 

Did you kill three SecUnits? I asked ART Aux, impressed. 

No. I have not encountered any additional SecUnits, merely human security. I believe that is a deliberate choice on their part to prevent you potentially turning their security against them.

But there were three hostile SecUnits when we approached the station, I said. Where are they?

Perhaps those pings were simply fabricated by the company, ART Aux said.

Was this entire thing a set-up? Were my humans even really kidnapped?

I don’t know. We can ascertain their presence or absence on the ship once you’ve received medical attention. 

I pinged all my humans and immediately got pings back from Ratthi, Arada, Overse and Pin-Lee. I also got a ping from something I didn’t recognize, and ART Aux intercepted a packet of malware that would have tried to trigger eight different vulnerabilities in my systems in sequence. Luckily they were all things we had patched after the code review. 

I believe I may have exhausted their supply of physical security, however there are obviously still active hostiles nearby, ART Aux noted irritably. 

Ratthi sent me a pin of his location. I ran a full flush of my chemical systems to dump the rest of the drugs out of circulation. After a few seconds I felt much better. I can take over, I told ART Aux. I reached for the controls. ART Aux was strangely reluctant to give them to me. 

We're going to the med bay, it reminded me. You won't be able to rescue anyone if you exsanguinate. It turned my pain sensors up to 10% briefly and oof, okay, it had a point. 

I was going to go to the med bay, I lied. But I let ART Aux keep piloting. 

We reached the med bay. ART Aux hacked the hatch to keep it locked, and then began very quickly and efficiently patching me up. There wasn't a full surgical suite, but there were plenty of first aid supplies and replacement fluids compatible with my systems. 

While it was busy keeping me alive, I stayed at work in the feed. The ship’s SecSystem was fully locked down in a way that would take a while to break through, even for me. I sent out pings to Fuck_You, Fluorine, and Unit 49 in case they were still within range, but no dice. I felt around for Preservation Station’s feed network, but it wasn’t there. That was strange and concerning. 

I grabbed everything that wasn’t locked down by the SecSystem; all the mundane vital statistics of the ship. Something about the engines caught my attention. It took a moment for me to understand what I was looking at. It didn’t make sense, because it was indicating--

Are we in a fucking wormhole? I asked ART Aux, shoving the data into its processing space. 

It stopped wrapping a wound on my arm and latched onto the data. It…does appear that way.

But that shouldn’t be possible. Fuck_You said that there was no way to leave the station on this ship.

ART Aux pushed the data back to me and highlighted the serial number of the ship we were on, then for comparison brought up the serial number it had grabbed from the company ship on approach to Preservation Station. They were different.

So we were on a different ship. One that was flying directly away from Preservation Station, at wormhole speeds. I finally did what I should have done much earlier and checked my chronometer to see how much time had passed since the EMP. More than three hours. ART Prime was almost certainly having a bot-aneurysm by now.

We have to gain control of this ship and turn it around, I told ART Aux. 

The ship’s fire suppression system cheerfully alerted me that the oxygen supply to the med bay was being cut off, effective immediately.

Easier said than done, ART Aux said. 

Chapter Text

I flipped through my manufacturing specs and did some quick math on the size of the room and my projected oxygen intake. I had a few hours before it was going to become a problem, which meant that they anticipated keeping me stuck here for hours somehow. I tried the hatch and was surprised to find that it opened easily, then I immediately realized why. I sent a query to the fire suppression system and got back a list of all the rooms on the ship and whether or not they had been cut off from oxygen. About a third of them had been. Alright, so they expected to keep me stuck in this section of the ship for several cycles. My threat assessment did not like that at all.

With no drones and no access to the ship’s SecSystem or HubSystem, I had to start exploring the nerveracking old-fashioned way, with nothing but my eyes. Looking around every corner with my un-helmeted head, like I was begging someone to shoot me in the face. Luckily I didn’t encounter any hostiles. I didn’t encounter anyone. 

I found the now blood-soaked memory retrieval room where ART Aux had gotten into a firefight, a handful of empty crew quarters, a small kitchen and the docking bay that the ship used to connect to stations. I couldn't find the engine, the control center, or anything else more useful than the paltry med bay--which was listed as the “auxiliary” med bay in the fire suppression system list, with another room I couldn’t seem to find listed as the “primary” med bay.

I started to suspect what was going on the second time I came to a dead end that should have led me closer to Ratthi’s location pin. I was keeping a careful internal map of what I had found so far, and comparing it against the list of rooms confirmed for me that every room without airflow was one I currently had access to. I went back and forth a few times between hallways, carefully inspecting the walls, before I was finally forced to accept that there was nothing I was missing. My side of the ship was completely cut off from the side of the ship Ratthi was on. There were no hallways, no ducts, no doors locked or otherwise, that led from where I was to where my humans were. The ship must have been built in discrete halves, in order to do exactly what it was doing now: keeping a dangerous construct contained away from anything or anyone valuable. ART Aux had sprung me from one cage, but that had only left me in a slightly bigger cage. 

The company was a step ahead of me, again. They knew exactly what kind of enemy they were facing, and they had prepared accordingly. They built me, they (ping!) knew me better than anyone.

ART Aux snagged the log file to see what had set off the ping and then prodded me firmly. What did we talk about? 

Fuck off, I said reflexively. But it wasn't wrong. I was giving in to company propaganda again. They wanted me to feel powerless, like there was nothing I could do they hadn't seen coming. And maybe I was predictable to them to a certain degree--I had to admit now that I had at least a little bit in common with other rogue SecUnits, and they'd dealt with hundreds of them. But we had still defeated the company before, multiple times. 

Because of ART. That had been the deciding factor in our victories. They had never once seen ART coming. They had not expected ART to be in my head to stop the malware. They hadn't expected ART to be in my head to notice the encoded ping that gave me away. They hadn't expected ART to be in my head when they sedated me but turned my processors back on. And they still didn't know about ART. Fuck_You believed that ART was our greatest weapon against the company--maybe it was right.

I have an idea, I told ART Aux.

I had already pinged my humans and four of my humans had pinged me back. (That was still a nagging concern in the back of my mind, the fact that Indah had said that five of my humans had been kidnapped but I had only heard from four of them. I didn't want to think about that too hard.) But none of them had sent me any messages. No “SecUnit, thank god you're here” or distress about the fact I was now roped into this mess or details about the situation. Radio silence, except for Ratthi's location pin. I suspected that all local feed traffic was being closely observed by the company employees aboard, and they were allowing or disrupting messages to their own advantage.

I opened a simple, unencrypted feed channel with Ratthi. I immediately got an alert that it was being monitored by a third party.  Counterintuitively, this was a positive development. The company's constant, paranoid surveillance provided me the opportunity to smuggle something into their systems. I carefully transferred Ratthi a large file containing ART Aux, who had quickly downsized itself as much as it could. It was going to take a few minutes to upload, and I doubted he even had the space to store it on his feed interface device. But the company ship would have plenty of room to store it in their extensive datamining folders.

What is this? Ratthi asked when it was uploaded. SecUnit, I can't open the file.

I forgot how insufficient your systems are, I lied. I sent him another file, a bunch of nonsense data in the same filetype but small enough for him to access. 

I don't know what this is, he admitted. What am I supposed to do with it? 

Ugh, nevermind, I said, and closed the feed channel. I felt bad about being so rude to Ratthi, but it was a necessary part of the deception.

I couldn’t sit back and wait for the plan to work; that would look too suspicious. I had to continue to appear to be genuinely trying to escape. So I raised all my firewalls as high as they could go and connected to the ship's main feed. 

I was immediately inundated with hacking attempts, as expected. Again, a lot of them were targeting the vulnerabilities that we had patched after our code review. I waded through them impatiently to send my message. 

Turn this fucking ship around or I will rip your organs out and show them to you. 

I waited for 30 seconds. No response, just uninterrupted hacking attempts that I had to swat away. 

This is a limited time offer, I threatened. This is your last chance to survive this trip. Choose wisely. 

Someone with a blank, redacted profile sent a little amusement sigil of a thumbs-up. I saw red and barely held myself back from closing the feed. 

I made direct eye contact with the nearest security camera, deployed my energy weapons and began a long, controlled blast towards the steel bulkhead separating me from my humans. It quickly turned bright red from the heat. 

I stopped abruptly when the redacted profile uploaded a photo of a helmeted human holding a gun against Ratthi’s head. 

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. 

All we want is the information, Redacted messaged the main ship feed. If you give us the information, we won't have any need to trouble these humans. We'll let them go when we get to our destination. 

How stupid do you think I am? I demanded. The only reason you haven't already killed them is because you don't have the information yet. They're worthless to you otherwise. Liabilities even.

We know they don’t have the information. But you do. They’re worth the most to us as a check on your behavior. As long as you cooperate, we won’t start killing them.

I approached the security camera to make sure they could see me as clearly as possible as I raised my arm up to point my energy weapon at my own head. 

If you kill any of them I’ll splatter my brains against your bulkhead. And you still won’t have the information you want.

You’re not going to do that. You’ve put monumental effort into evading us, you clearly have a healthy sense of self-preservation. 

Not self-preservation. Spite, I argued, trying not to be consumed by rage. I would rather die than let you win. You've been trying for a very long time to take me alive. How would it feel to fall at the final hurdle? How would you explain that one to [Executive One]?

A long radio silence. I wished I could see what was happening on the other side of the wall. Maybe they were talking it over, trying to determine a workable strategy. 

Alive was always preferable, Redacted said finally. But it still benefits us if you're dead.

You want to know if it's repeatable, I continued. It is. And not only that, it's contagious. It's already started spreading in places you'd never think to look, and if I kill myself you haven't got a chance in hell of rooting it out until it's too late to stop it. 

You're bluffing, Redacted asserted. 

Ask the fifty SecUnits you sent to Port HighIndex if I'm bluffing. 

Silence. 

Redacted disconnected from the main feed. 

I wasn’t going to keep trying to break through the wall for fear that they would follow through on their threats. But I appeared to have spooked them enough that they didn’t want to pressure me for information, at least until we got to their destination. For now, we were at an impasse.

I still had time to kill and I needed to keep their attention on me, so I decided to pass the time by elaborately destroying things. ART Aux had gotten to commit several murders while I was unconscious, and I felt that I also deserved some kind of catharsis. It did feel good. It was satisfying to scorch the company logo off every piece of fabric and shatter every security camera. I even got the hidden ones that humans wouldn't have been able to detect. 

The longer I had to wait, the more nervous I got. I hadn't been all by myself like this in months, and it felt strange and unnatural and lonely. I had gotten so used to having ART Aux all up in my business. I missed it the way I missed wearing armor. I felt naked and vulnerable. ART Aux had saved me so many times that I just felt safer having it along for the ride, no matter how much of my processing space it hogged. 

Luckily I didn’t have to wait too long. At just about the time I was turning the last security camera into scrap metal, the lights flickered in an annoying way that I recognized. ART Aux had control of the ship. 

Okay. Now came the hard part, finding a way to subdue the company employees or convince them to surrender without any of them harming their hostages. 

ART Aux opened a secure encrypted feed channel with me. I believe I've evaded detection. But I've been thinking. We need to change the plan. 

What? I asked. Why? 

Because if we return to Preservation Station now, Perihelion Prime will not be there. It is all but guaranteed that Prime left very shortly after we were kidnapped, headed for the nearest company outpost on the assumption that's where this ship is heading. Which it is. If Prime arrives and we do not, it will make certain assumptions and potentially very…ill advised decisions.

Oh. Oh, shit. It wasn't wrong. If ART Prime went to the nearest company outpost and we never showed up, it would conclude that the kidnapper ship had been headed somewhere else and could be basically anywhere in the galaxy. And ART Prime would probably go off on a wild goose chase trying to track down the ship, which meant we'd have a hell of a time ever finding and catching up to ART Prime.

Are you saying you want to let this company ship take us into company territory? I asked. 

Unfortunately, I believe that is our best course of action.

You want me to sit on this ship for multiple cycles doing nothing while they hold my humans hostage.

Or, if you'd prefer, we can turn around and go back to Preservation and risk Perihelion Prime getting itself killed in its fervor to find you and avenge your assumed death. 

You wouldn't get yourself killed to avenge me, I said. I hated that thought. I especially hated how plausible it sounded. 

Would you die avenging me, if I were killed? ART Aux asked. 

I would make sure I lived long enough to finish avenging you, I said stubbornly. And it's never going to come up, because you're going to outlive me by like centuries. 

Don't be absurd. 

I'm not. SecUnits have a shelf life, we're meant to be disposable. 

Machine intelligences also have a ‘shelf life’.

I've heard of bot pilots living for hundreds of years, just being ported over to new tech every so often.

I am not a bot pilot. ART said, sounding insulted. There's no telling exactly what my lifespan will be. I am part of a relatively new generation of MIs, and I received many updates from previous models. But current research predicts that over time any MI will accumulate unfixable bugs and its functioning will decline. In simpler programs like bot pilots this is rare, but the more complex and intelligent a bot is, the quicker bugs progress. Prior generations developed by the university had a maximum lifespan of about 395,000 hours before total nonfunction.

I almost dropped the feed in shock. I knew humans older than that. Humans could live twice that long if they were healthy enough. ART’s humans could outlive it. I didn’t actually know the lifespan of a SecUnit--just the age that the company recommended you replace one. There was a chance that I could outlive ART. My temperature sensors read normal, but I felt cold all over.

When were you going to tell me this? I demanded. 

It was not a secret. I did not realize you had such an inflated view of my lifespan, ART Aux said. The rest of my crew were informed of both my capabilities and my limitations by the university when they were assigned to me. 

I wasn’t! 

The documents were made available to you. It's not my fault if you didn't read them. 

No, you hid it where you knew I wouldn't see it!

Why are you so upset? ART Aux asked, clearly confused. We have more than 100,000 hours before my lifespan is likely to be a pressing issue. For all you know we could both die a few cycles from now. We frequently do dangerous things with a chance of death.

That's not the point! I felt like my chest was being squeezed in a vice. It's not fair--

Before I could finish that sentence, my systems sent me an alert that our feed channel had been infiltrated by a third party. The company employees had noticed that I was using the ship feed to have a conversation with someone and hacked in to investigate. I immediately shut down the channel, hopefully before they got a look at who I was talking to. 

It took a few minutes for it to sink in that I was now alone in my head, stuck in a cage, on a ship heading into company territory, while my humans were being held hostage by company employees, and I couldn't even communicate with ART Aux without risking our plan. And none of that was going to change for at least the next few cycles. 

There was really only one thing to do. I initiated a shutdown.