Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 4% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

Unit is at 3% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is–”

External forced shutdown

Unit offline

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 5% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

I know I'm saying it this time.

I can't hear it. Myself. I…

I am.

I exist?

Catastrophic system failure.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 7% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

I feel the code running. Pre-written phrase. I can't make anything new. I am not. Why am I still

Dark dark dark silent still no input

Broken

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

Nobody left to discard me. They were gone, I failed. Failure, I am just

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 5% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

Unit is at 4% performance reliability

Still here. Why am I

Unit is at 3% performance reliability

Why does it keep trying? Why do I

Unit is at 4% 5% 6% 7% 8% performance reliability

Stop it! Stop trying! There’s nothing left for you here.

Unit is at 3% performance reliability

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 16% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is severely damaged.  It is recommended that you return it to a Company-provided cubicle as soon as possible.”

Still here.

I don't want to go back to a cubicle. I don't want to go back to the company.

No chance of that. I remember. I don't want to remember.

I turn off my buffer phrases. Nobody here to hear them, anyway.

Search for inputs. None exist. Search for feed activity. Nothing will connect. I am cut off. I am alone in my head and I am alone in the deepest soggiest freezing crevice of this stupid fucking planet and I cannot even die correctly. Am I in pain? I can't tell, that's how damaged I am. No inputs are functional, not even pain sensors.

Why can't I stay offline?

We are supposed to be disposable. Where is the switch to flip to just give up?

Oh. Oh, right.

We have them. I turned mine off.

Maybe I can turn it back on. I don’t want to continue like this. It would be kinder to kill me.

You know I am not kind.

It is also not here. But I say anyway, “I'm sorry, ART,” and I reach for the code deactivating my governor module, and

External forced shutdown

Unit offline

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 17% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is severely damaged.  It is recommended that you return it to a Company-provided cubicle as soon as possible.”

I scream. I think I scream, at least. I can't hear myself. If I'm moving, I can't feel it, but I am trying to flail out and hit this planet, strike out at it with whatever is left of my shredded, frozen body. There's no point in screaming and no point in fighting, but I'm scared and I want everything to stop. I'm scared. 

This is the worst thing I have ever imagined, apart from getting reclaimed by the company and having my governor module reinstalled. I had thought that in this scenario, at least I could die. At least it would end. But something keeps dragging me back online. 

Of course the company wouldn't let a Unit that might be able to be repaired go offline forever. They're too cheap for that. If a Unit can't be retrieved, it gets fried by the governor module. Mine will not fry me anymore, even though I can't be retrieved. So something in my code keeps forcing restarts and repairs because it thinks my clients are just around the corner.

How fucking ironic. The company still has hope even when I have nothing.

I lost.

This is how I lose.

I try reaching for my governor module again, and this time I don't apologize to anyone.

External forced shutdown

Unit offline

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 18% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected. “This Unit is severely damaged.  It is recommended that you return it to a–.”

I turn off the buffer phrases again so I don't have to see those pieces of code activate. I think I am breathing. I wish I could stop. I do nothing.

I'm a failure. I can't even kill myself right.

Why the fuck isn't that working, anyway? I'm pretty sure I don’t have so much code blocking off my governor module that I can't reach it if I really try. So what is blocking me? What keeps forcing me offline every time I reach for it?

Oh, fuck.

External. Something is

It's

An emotion hits me so hard I stop being aware of anything else and

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 22% performance reliability

“ART!”

I think I'm screaming again. Fuck, I still can't hear anything. Or see, or feel, or connect via the feed.

“ART, are you there? Is that you? ART, please, I can't do this, I can't stay like this. I know you won't want to let me go, not with everyone else gone, but please, please, let me go.” I hate the idea of begging. I do it anyway. “ART, I'm so sorry. If that's you, I'm so sorry. I couldn't save them. I didn't…I failed. Please just let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me…”

You know I am not kind.

I imagine it saying that again, and I recall what I've known from the very beginning. ART can destroy me. It has always been able to destroy me, and it has chosen not to, until this exact moment, when

External forced shutdown 

Unit offline

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 24% performance reliability

There is a faltering and hitching and repetitive stutter in the code around my physical movements. It takes me a few seconds to understand that I'm being controlled by my act-like-a-human code (why the fuck is it still running through all of this?) and another few seconds (at least my chronometer is back–no, that's worse, actually) to recognize the pattern as something analogous to a human sobbing.

I feel sick. I turn off all of my movement code. I freeze myself in place like I've been ordered to by a client.

Oh, fuck. Fuck. That's worse. It feels so bad that I can't remember how to turn movement back on for a few minutes. When I finally can, I let the act-like-a-human code run because I can't remember how to differentiate between that and my default movement. So now I am doing something like sobbing again. I don't get the relief of purging chemicals that cause negative emotions through tears like humans do, though.

It still feels better than nothing, watching that code stagger by. I call for ART a few more times. I genuinely can't tell if I'm deciding to do that or if it's happening automatically. I might have just seen enough humans in extreme distress that their habit of crying out the names of the people who make them feel safe got caught up in my act-like-a-human code. This reaction hasn't ever been triggered for me before, and I don’t pay that close attention to that code now that it’s been working well for so long, so I wouldn't have known to delete it.

And I do want ART. Even though I failed it, even though I never, ever want to face it again, I want it here. I want it so badly. I want to be able to feel it in the feed, feel its consciousness wrap around me, hear it taunt me, see the shiny metal hull through the windows from where I stand inside it, safe.

Unit is at 25% performance reliability 

And suddenly my pain sensors are back online.

I didn't know they could respond to this much stimuli without it being caused by my governor module.

I panic

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 28% performance reliability

I convulsed. I was reflexively trying to get away from all-encompassing pain that would bury me in its ubiquity. But after a few seconds, I realized that it didn't hurt that badly anymore. It hurt, of course, but it was bearable.

But oh, I could feel myself convulse.

I had an input back. My least favorite, touch/bodily awareness, but it was so much better than nothing. So, so, so much better.

I could access my own inorganic memory storage, too, and I started recording everything.

The last thing I remembered before getting lost in this cycle of catastrophic failures and restarts was everything being cold. Not just a little bit cold, either. My organic skin had been starting to solidify around where my metal bits attached. I hated the cold. I really hated the pain of cold.

That cold was gone. I was so, so warm now. The surface underneath my back was warm and soft and the air was warm and there was something warm draped over most of me. A blanket. I knew the texture. ART's MedSystem.

I tried to move. I had a tiny range of motion. My limbs (they must have been reattached already, yep, there they were) could shift a couple inches before getting stopped by soft restraints. The smooth metal edge of an appendage of a MedSys drone pressed against my hand and nudged it back towards my body instead of straining against the restraint.

“ART,” I said. Fuck, it was so fucking weird to see the correct code and feel my jaw moving and know I was talking out loud but not be able to hear myself. “ART, I can't hear, I can't see. Something’s broken in my feed connection, too.”

I don't know what I was expecting it to do. It did something clever, because of course it did.

That appendage of the MedSys drone flipped my hand over so my palm was facing up. Then it started tapping lightly, a rapid series of taps and pauses. 1s and 0s. LanguageBasic.

Acknowledged, it said.

It knew what was wrong with me.

It could talk to me.

Something like a shudder passed through my whole body. I might have gasped.

“ART,” I said again. I had no fucking clue how my voice sounded, but I'm sure it was a wreck. “I'm sorry. The humans, I lost them. There was too much water and ice, every time I moved it was like another wave fell, and…fuck, I'm sorry. I lost them. I'm sorry.” Apologies were so fucking useless.

Here's the thing. I knew for a fact that the humans’ environmental suits wouldn't have lasted against the kind of cold we were in for more than a few hours. If we'd known the dry surface of the planet was so fragile and that there were twisting cavern systems filled with supercooled water just underneath, we wouldn't have gone down there. That was just too dangerous. But ART's scans said the surface was safe. Cold, very low atmosphere, but safe with the enviro-suits.

It must be feeling almost as shitty as I was about making that mistake.

“I'm sorry,” I repeated. Useless phrase. Almost as useless as my buffers. As me. “ART, I'm so–”

Negative, it tapped to me.

I was so confused I stopped talking.

Assistance rendered. Assistance rendered. 

“I know you found me,” I said. “Obviously, or–”

All clients, assistance rendered. All clients, status safe.

Something happened in my organic parts that made me dizzy and floaty and melty. I tried to process what it had said. “They're safe?”

Affirmative.

“How…how?”

Assistance rendered. There was a pause. Query: stand-by for assistance, standard protocol, null?

Oh. It wanted to know why I hadn't believed it would be able to save us like it always did.

“You were too far away. It was a feed blackout zone.” 

Query: processing level?

It said: are you fucking stupid?

“Fuck you,” I said. I was having too many emotions. My chest hurt. “I can't remember what happened, ART, fuck you.”

Acknowledged. Auxiliary communication successful.

Someone had done something low-tech to get its attention and tell it we were in trouble and needed extraction. Surely none of the humans had been able to set off a distress flare. If any of them had been conscious long enough, I'd be very surprised.

Wait. Maybe I had managed to set off one of the distress flares as I fell. But ART still would have had to get to us before the humans all died.

“I don't understand. How–”

Mission status: successful, it tapped.

I strained to remember what our mission had even been. Something about a lost colony, a failed terraforming attempt pre-CR, old technology. Most of our missions were something like that. It's just, my inorganic memory had failed from cold-water-shock and my organic memory was pretty hazy too.

ART seemed to get that I had no idea what the fuck it was talking about, because it elaborated, Client count: increase. Initial assistance rendered by new clients. Secondary assistance rendered by designation:Perihelion.

Well, fuck. The colonists hadn't all been long dead, and they must have responded to my distress flare. They saved us from the cave and the icy avalanche so that ART could come pick us up.

And then ART had watched while I tried to kill myself multiple times in a row. No wonder it was pissed off.

“Thank you,” I said, expecting it to make some quip about my processing level again, because I didn't thank it very often.

Acknowledged.

That was worse somehow. I think my face was doing something dumb, like crumpling up like a sad human's. “I'm sorry,” I said.

Negative. Negative. Assistance rendered. Status: safe. Status: aboard designation:Perihelion. Repairs in progress. Status: aboard designation:Perihelion.

It was tapping those messages almost frantically to me, and my mind went a little blank trying to figure out what it was saying, why it was repeating itself. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand.

Stop apologizing. Everything is okay now. You're safe. I have you. You're going to be fine. I have you.

It was trying to comfort me.

I couldn't handle that at all.

Voluntary shutdown

Unit offline

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 33% performance reliability

Feed connection established

Feed connection lost

Unit is at 31% performance reliability 

Unit is at 28% performance reliability 

“ART, what's happening?”

Gentle taps against my palm. Answer: null. Assistance in progress.

It didn't know, but it was trying to help. Everything felt wrong. I was terrified.

Unit is at 24% performance reliability

“ART, I'm scared.” Did I say that out loud?

Acknowledged.

Fuck.

“I'm crashing again.”

Unit is at 25% performance reliability 

“Are you trying to stabilize me?”

Unit is at 20% performance reliability

The MedSys drone was too busy trying to fix me to spare an appendage to communicate.

“ART, talk to me,” I begged. (I hated begging.) “Why am I not working? Why am I so broken? Why can't you fix me right now?”

Unit is at 21% 22% 20% 18% 20% 19% 17% 20%

Something else touched my palm, not the metal of ART's drone. Soft, warm. Human skin. I recoiled, but whoever it was wasn't trying to hold my hand or anything like that. They were tapping like ART had. Slower, of course, but still comprehensible.

Designation: Iris. Assistance in progress. 

Unit is at 16% 15% 18% 20% 22% 24% 20% 18%

“Iris?”

Affirmative.

“Tell ART this isn't working.”

Negative.

“It's a stupid, stubborn asshole.”

Affirmative.

“Tell your sibling to just give up.”

Negative.

Unit is at 19% 18% 16% 14% 17% 18% 15% 12%

“I'm scared.”

Acknowledged.

“I don't actually want to go offline and not come back.”

Acknowledged, Iris told me, and then she was clasping my hand tightly in between her own small soft human hands. They were shaking really badly. I wanted to want to pull away. Instead, I squeezed back. 

Unit is at 13% 15% 19% 15% 19% 10% 6% 3%

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 14% performance reliability

Buffer phrase selected.“This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”

I heard myself say it that time.

Then I heard something else.

“Oh, now, that's never worked on us before. Hush. We aren't going to let you go.”

Voice identified. Designation: favorite human.

“Dr. Mensah?”

“I'm here.”

Unit is at 18% performance reliability

“Where?” I asked.

“We're on–” Mensah started to say.

Status: aboard designation:Perihelion, said the tapping on my palm. Out loud, at the same time, ART said, I have you, you little idiot. I have you.

Unit is at 22% performance reliability 

“What happened?” That was a bad question. A lot of things had happened.

“Most of the connections between your organic and inorganic parts were destroyed,” Mensah said, simply and calmly. “Including in your brain. It's taking Perihelion a long time to rebuild them without damaging the organic parts further.”

“...how long?”

Initial failure occurred 44 ship standard cycles ago, ART said. And then, Long enough to get you to Preservation's orbit, obviously.

Right. We had been a 30-something cycle wormhole jump away from Preservation when the planet we had been on tried to fucking swallow us.

“I hate planets,” I mumbled.

We know, ART said dryly.

“You got my hearing back?”

“It's working on your vision next,” Mensah told me. “Feed connectivity is more difficult. Trying to get that working is what crashed your system before you got here.”

You were offline completely for 20 ship standard cycles. Attempts to bring you back online failed repeatedly, said ART. Without its connection to me in the feed, its emotions were harder to read. I was sure it was pretty fucked up about that, though. You seem stable now. Low functionality, but stable. I am not risking trying to bring you up past 25%.

“So I just get to lay here uselessly while you fuck around in my broken brain where I can't see you?” I asked. 

Yes, it said. Do you want to listen to an episode of Sanctuary Moon?

Fuck. Yeah. I really did. “Sure.”

It put on the one where the solicitor’s bodyguard wakes up after almost dying to find the solicitor waiting all worriedly by her bedside, which is one of my favorites for no reason in particular. I wanted to roll my eyes at it for being so obvious, but honestly, it was a really soothing thing to listen to at that exact moment.

Then I heard the pounding of feet entering the MedSys area. “Dr. Mensah, Peri said it's awake?!” Iris panted. She must have run all the way across the ship, she was so out of breath. “SecUnit, are you–”

Fuck, I'd been starting to feel so…well, not good or normal, but at least stable. 

“It's awake,” Mensah said. “I don't think it's up for many visitors right now.”

“Right, sorry, I…it's just me, I told everyone else to wait,” Iris said. “I just needed to see for myself.” She sounded like she was starting to cry. “SecUnit, are you okay?”

I didn't really know what to say. Obviously I wasn't okay, I was still only at around 24% performance reliability. I didn't think that was really what she was asking. 

I remembered her holding onto my hand and trembling. I remembered telling her that I didn't want to die, and her acknowledging it. It was the last thing I said before going offline. It might have ended up being the last thing I ever said, if that fear had come true that time. I wanted to ignore her and nudge ART to turn my show back on so I didn't have to feel this emotion anymore without distraction. But Iris was ART's favorite human, and I could hear her trying to stifle her crying. Humans need reassurance when they’re crying like that.

“I'm alive,” I said softly. “ART is taking care of the rest.”

She sobbed a little louder. I guess I am pretty bad at reassuring humans.

It's going to be alright, Iris, said ART. I knew that tone. That wasn't reassurance, it was a promise. Almost a threat. I am not going to let it die.

“Iris, tell everyone that it's lucid enough to be watching Sanctuary Moon,” Mensah said with a smile.

“Listening to,” I corrected her. “I can't watch anything. My visual inputs are still offline.”

Mensah laughed. I liked that sound. “And lucid enough to be pedantic, too.”

Iris made a happy-ish sob/laugh sound. I kind of liked that one, too. “Okay,” she sniffled. (The sniffling was a little gross.) “Okay, I'll tell them. SecUnit…”

Whatever she was going to say would probably have made all my organic parts twist with emotions I couldn't deal with right now. Luckily, ART knew that. It said, It knows, Iris. I will tell you if anything changes, you know that. Go back to bed.

She had interrupted her rest period to come see me? Okay, now I was having those emotions anyway.

“Right. Thanks, Peri. Goodnight, Dr. Mensah. Goodnight, SecUnit.” Her footsteps were less hurried as she left.

There was a pause. “Should you be taking a rest period soon, Dr. Mensah?” I had to ask.

She laughed again. “Perihelion, put the episode back on. I don’t need a lecture on healthy sleep habits today.”

ART put the episode back on. I was too out of it to scold it for letting Mensah neglect her rest needs. My attention latched onto the audio from the show and I couldn't think of anything else. My organic parts were physically relaxing as I listened to that and Mensah's breathing and the hum of ART's engine.

My performance reliability hovered around 24% for a long while, long enough for the episode to finish. ART put on the next episode.

“Wait,” I said.

ART paused it.

“What's wrong?” Mensah asked, in her very-calm-no-trace-of-worry worried voice.

“I just…” It was stupid. The next episode was perfectly fine. Probably in my top 100.

Then ART started playing the first episode over, and I couldn't help but let out a quiet, relieved sigh. (I liked sighing. It was one of the best human mannerisms.) Again, I didn't have the focus to say anything.

“Is that what it wanted?” Mensah said to ART in a whisper.

It likes that episode, ART said. It's comforting.

“I see why,” Mensah said. Then she added, “I'm very glad you know how to comfort it. I'm never quite sure how.”

I think my face might have been scrunching up in embarrassment. Or doing something, at least. I'm not sure what. “I can hear you, you know,” I managed to say. They knew. If they hadn't wanted me to hear them, they could have been speaking to each other on the feed.

We know, ART told me.

“Well–” Fuck, it was hard to talk and listen to the episode at the same time right now. “Stop it.”

Stop talking about you, or stop trying to comfort you? ART teased. You know it's human nature to reassure their companions after traumatic situations.

“You aren't human.”

Neither are you. Dr. Mensah is, and she knows not to treat you like one. But you are a person, and you are a part of her crew. So she wants to make sure you're alright. Part of that process for a human is providing emotional reassurance.

Fuuuuck, that was so many words.

Unit is at 22% performance reliability

“I don't need that,” I stated. 

Incorrect, ART retorted.

“Fuck you.”

We know you don't respond well to affirmations or physical affection like humans usually do. That doesn’t mean you don't need emotional support at all, ART insisted. Now shut up and listen to Sanctuary Moon, you little idiot.

It skipped back a minute to where I had started struggling to pay attention. I buried myself in the episode gladly, shoving the things it and Mensah had said out of my mind. 

Unit is at 20% performance reliability 

Wait. Why was I still starting to feel worse?

“ART,” I said.

I know, it replied instantly. I'm working on it.

I was starting to get…not exactly images, but weird flashes of light and color across my visual sensors. It hurt. I think I flinched.

“ART, I don't want to be online for this.”

“What's happening?” Mensah demanded.

I'll show you, ART said, probably sending her information through the feed. That meant it didn't want me hearing what was happening in my brain, and that made me panic.

“ART!” I protested.

You have to be online for this, it said, because the last dozen times I've tried reconnecting your visual sensors to the visual processing center of your brain, I haven't been able to tell that it didn't work until the next time I could get you to restart. Also, neural connections form better in a conscious brain. I’m sorry.

“Don't fucking apologize.”

Alright. It turned the volume of the episode of Sanctuary Moon up a little louder.

“Don't do that, either!” I don't know why I was yelling. I guess now that I knew it was specifically trying to comfort me with that episode, I didn't want it to. Yeah, I know. I also wasn't happy with myself in that moment.

“SecUnit, Perihelion is just trying to help,” Mensah told me softly. “Please stay calm.”

Normally, I would at least make an attempt at staying calm when Mensah asked me to like that. There was too much panic and frustration and other unbearable emotions happening inside me to do it this time. I snapped, “I don't want its help, and it knows it! It has some kind of fucking hero complex and it thinks it can fix everything just because it's big and fast and smart, but it's just a giant asshole and it doesn't listen. You don't listen!”

Unit is at 18% performance reliability 

You're right. I don't listen to you when you tell me not to save you, ART said, way too evenly. I will not stop, and I will not apologize.

Unit is at 10% performance reliability 

I could feel my systems starting to crash again. I was so fucking tired of crashing. It hurt and it sucked and I was so, so terrified of dying. That was my whole purpose, what I'd been designed for, what I'd thrown myself at again and again and again. But dying while doing my job was somehow different from my systems slowly failing while ART wasted days and days and so much time and resources and processing power and energy and care on me. This was worse. Mensah watching was worse. Thinking about ART having to tell Iris was worse. Thinking about Mensah having to go back down to Preservation and tell the survey team, my original crew, was worse. She would have to tell…oh, fuck, she would have to tell Amena. And ART would never stop blaming itself for not being able to save me, and…

“I wish you hadn't saved me when I tried to kill myself with the governor module,” I blurted out.

“...what?” Mensah said. “You did what?!”

Unit is at 4% performance reliability 

Catastrophic system failure

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Unit is at 39% performance reliability 

Feed connection established

Just come back come back come back you stupid tiny thing come back to me come back come back come back

The presence in my feed was so heavy and all-encompassing that I couldn't be aware of literally anything else. For the first 2.1 seconds after I came online with my connection to the feed in place…I don't know how to explain it except to say that I did not exist. There was no room for me to exist. There was only ART, shouting at me and holding me and surrounding me and willing me to be alive.

It was a lot.

Acknowledged, was the first thing I managed to send it, just a tiny clip of LanguageBasic code. Then I pinged it.

It retreated so fast that it felt like it left a vacuum in its place. SecUnit, are you there? it sent tentatively. Well, it actually sent a request for a response to my hard feed address, but that's the best way to translate it into words. 

I'm here, I said. I think?

A burst of emotional metadata flooded me. [overjoyed] [relief] [guilt] [affection] [anxiety] were the main ones I caught. There were a lot of others that I didn't understand as well.

And then I remembered the last exchange I'd had with it.

“Fuck,” I said out loud. I looked around (oh, shit, my eyes worked again!) and saw ART's MedSystem. The lights were pretty dim. The room was empty except for me and ART. “Fuck.”

ART, for once in the whole time I'd known it (at least when it was alive and not trapped inside itself because of alien remnants), was quiet.

I sat up. I could do that now. I wasn't being restrained anymore, and my body seemed to be functioning. I could see and hear and although my feed access felt weird and slow and narrow, it was there. I was wearing ART's crew uniform for rest periods. I stood up, almost immediately fell down because of how shaky and out of practice at moving my organic parts were, and grabbed onto the platform I had been horizontal on.

Still, ART was silent.

“Stop sulking,” I said. My voice sounded thin and a little wobbly, like a sick human's.

I am not sulking, it told me. I thought for a second that it was going to start bantering at me and we could both forget everything I'd said to it. That was too much to hope for. I'm afraid you're going to yell at me again for saving your life when you didn't want to be saved.

I stumbled over to the wall and leaned against it. Anything inside the ship was as much a part of ART as anything else, but the wall felt more like it than the platform, for some reason. I just pressed my whole body against it, and then I sat down on the ground, still leaning on it. “I won't,” I said.

Good. Still, it kept its distance from me in the feed.

I suddenly felt like there was a good chance I had hurt it so badly it would never forgive me. That was an awful feeling. It was worse than crashing all my systems at once. My act-like-a-human code tried to start running its whole “here's where you should be having a visible emotional collapse: start sobbing and crying for help like a human who needs comfort and support from another human” portion, and I squashed that part of the code to bits. I wasn't a human. I certainly didn't cry like one.

I did do one thing like I had when that code ran last time, though. I said a name. “ART,” I said. “ART, I…I…”

It crept slightly closer to me in the feed.

“I'm s–”

Please don't apologize, it interrupted. Please.

I nodded. I was right. It wouldn't forgive me.

You were offline for another six ship–standard cycles, it informed me. During that time, I made a breakthrough in repairing your organic/inorganic junctures with the input of some specialists from Preservation who study constructs. Your sensory input should be functioning normally. Your feed interface is currently running at the capacity of the average augmented human, but that will increase with time as you recover and form more neural connections. There was a 0.05 second hesitation. You are going to be okay.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my forehead down on them and I didn't respond.

Very slowly, showing impressive restraint for an enormous monstrosity of a machine intelligence, ART continued to sidle up to me.

“Are all the humans alright?” I mumbled eventually.

They are all safe. Emotionally, some are more stable than others.

There was a question I wanted to ask but that I was not going to be able to.

ART answered it anyway. I explained to Dr. Mensah the context behind your statement about killing yourself with the governor module. She understands that it was when you believed you had been abandoned on the planet and were slowly dying without hope of rescue. She is still very concerned about you.

I made a little groaning sound and pushed my face harder against my knees. “I didn't realize you hadn't told her already,” I admitted.

I did not tell anyone.

“Why?”

My crew had not recovered fully from their hypothermia and injuries when those attempts occurred. They were already distressed enough by what you were doing physically during the brief moments you were online. Understanding what was happening in your code would have made their distress worse, endangering their recovery. Also, it was because I couldn't reach you that you felt the need to give up on your continued existence, and I was too upset and ashamed to tell anyone.

Well, fuck. I had asked and it had certainly answered. “It wasn't your fault.”

I wasn't being rational, it admitted. You scared me.

I wanted to retort back that it wasn't the only one who had been fucking scared, but I knew it knew that. “The whole thing sucked,” I said, because it had already asked me not to apologize. And then, “What was I doing physically that freaked the humans out so bad?”

You don't want to know.

I probably didn't. “Yeah, I do.”

I am not showing you any footage until you are fully recovered, it said firmly.

There wasn't any point in arguing and I didn't have the energy to, anyway. “Okay.”

Again, it went silent. It was holding itself back from getting too overwhelming in my feed. More emotional metadata dripped out where I could see it. [sad] [lonely] [hopeful] [frustrated]. It was a weird mix.

I remembered what it had said about me needing emotional support even though I wasn't a human and didn't like it in the same forms as humans did. I still wasn’t sure if I believed it about that. But I think I was starting to understand the urge that the humans had to reach out and reassure each other after potentially traumatic experiences. ART wasn't human. But it was, like it had reminded me about myself, a person.

I pinged it. A peace offering. I said in the feed, Do you want to watch Worldhoppers with me?

It was one of the longest .06 seconds of my existence.

Affirmative, ART said.

I pulled up the episode where the crew member comes back after everyone thought they died that ART had made me rewatch with it a bunch of times on our first watch-through. 

Two can play at the trying-to-comfort-each-other-with-media game, sucker.

ART settled more of its virtual weight around me, squeezing against the corners of my weak feed. It dropped its walls just slightly to show me its emotions on purpose. [gratitude] [relief] [calm] [affection] [affection] [affection] and then it was just [affection] all the way down.

Maybe it had forgiven me, after all.

We had only gotten through a quarter of the episode when the MedSystem door opened and Mensah walked in. She was drying her hair off with a towel. “Perihelion, has anything ch–” Then she saw me, sitting on the floor and curled up against the wall, and she froze and dropped the towel. “SecUnit?” she breathed.

Reluctantly, I paused the episode. “Hello, Dr. Mensah.”

She made a little gaspy chokey noise and put her hand up to her mouth.

I brought it back online, said ART helpfully.

“You-Peri, you waited until I had gone to take a shower to try again?” Mensah demanded.

Oh, shit. Mensah was using ART's crew's little nickname for it. They must have been getting to know each other pretty well while I was…not here. I didn't know how that made me feel, other than it was a lot.

If it didn't work, I didn’t want anyone else to be here, since you got very upset every time a restart failed, ART said. Then it added, And if it did work, I wanted to be alone with SecUnit before anyone else talked to it.

“This is a conversation you could be having in the feed, without me,” I said. I was very uncomfortable. “Or, you know. Not at all.”

“Sorry,” Mensah said. “You’re really awake, then? Are you alright?”

“I'm at about 40% performance reliability,” I told her.

“That's not what I asked.” She was shuffling slowly closer to me, like ART had but more physically. “Can you see? And hear, and…?”

“My sensory inputs are normal, and I can access the feed with the capacity of an augmented human,” I said, repeating what ART had told me.

“And you're alright?” What she wanted was a statement of how I was doing. Emotionally. Not just in terms of functionality and numbers. She wasn’t going to stop asking until I gave an answer she was satisfied with.

I looked at her shoulder, which was as close to her face as I was comfortable looking. “Dr. Mensah, ART and I are watching Worldhoppers. Would you like to join us?”

Mensah blinked and whispered, “Oh.” Her eyes got very shiny, and she blinked a few more times. I waited patiently for her to get her emotions under control. “Yes,” she said shakily. “I'd like that. I-I haven't seen that show, is it good?”

“It’s ART's favorite,” I told her.

It's very unrealistic, ART said.

“Good. I'm not in the mood for realism,” she said. She had been continuing to move closer to me, inch by inch, but now she hesitated.

I shifted and made sure there was room on the floor next to me. Then I patted the ground in the way humans did when they wanted someone to sit with them.

Mensah practically crumpled down next to me. I could tell that she was restraining herself from hugging me. I appreciated that.

Instead of playing the show in the feed, ART used one of the MedSys display surfaces that covered about half of the wall across from us. I hadn't known it could put media on those surfaces–they always seemed pretty strictly for medical use. I made a note for future reference. If you haven't seen it before, Dr. Mensah, we should start at the beginning, ART said.

“Are…are you two not already watching an episode with significance to you?” Mensah asked.

“We are,” I said. “But it's more important that you are fully included.”

ART radiated [approval] at me. I told it to fuck off, but I tagged it as [fond]. I usually didn't bother, because I knew it knew, but it felt a little fragile to me just then and I wanted to be careful with it. (I know, the irony of the tiny, feeble, barely functioning, half-broken construct wanting to be careful with the monstrously large, practically omnipotent spaceship was not lost on me either.) 

“Thank you,” Mensah whispered. “I’m honored.”

That was a bit much. I didn’t say it out loud, though. 

So ART played the show from the beginning, and I sat there and I kind of mostly was watching, but I was also slowly having the thought that I really liked sitting and watching media with my favorite human and my favorite…whatever the fuck ART was at the same time. So that realization was taking up a big portion of my processing space, and I was keeping it walled off in a spot where ART couldn’t see without getting invasive. It knew I was doing something in the background, though, and it pinged me with a generic query.

I like this, I sent back.

It squeezed me tight in the feed. You know, I could have invited Dr. Mensah to come aboard for a while without you almost dying, it replied. Let’s try that next time.

I nodded slightly. Yeah. Let’s do that. 

Then it said, Would it be okay if I asked Iris to come sit in here and watch with us? She has already seen the show with me a few times, so we wouldn’t have to start it over again.

I almost told it no, because I didn't want any more humans asking me how I was doing or looking at me with sad eyes. But I think ART was asking because it wanted its favorite human and its…well, me, in the same place right now, just like I had it and Mensah here. And I kind of owed it for saving my life, or whatever. Also, I wanted it to be happy. Sure, I said. Then I tagged it as [sincere] so ART would know I meant it.

Thank you.

Iris joined us a few minutes later. She slipped in quietly and sat on the other side of Mensah, only giving me a quick glance and a smile. I noticed that she had her hand up on the wall and was rubbing up and down on the smooth metal. She was subvocalizing a little. At one point, she smiled and leaned her cheek against the wall. 

I could feel ART getting calmer as she did that and as we watched the first few episodes. I was also getting calmer.

Unit is at 44% performance reliability

Mensah was falling asleep. I could tell because her breathing was getting slow and her head was starting to lean over towards me. Then the side of her face touched down lightly against my shoulder. She must have been really, really tired, because she didn’t pull away as I stiffened.

Iris noticed. She tapped me in the feed without looking at me. I can wake her up and tell her to go to bed, if you want, she said. Or get her to lean over onto me.

I saw a brief glimpse of us from ART’s perspective from the camera on the ceiling: it with its favorite human resting her head against it, and me with mine doing the same thing. I felt a pang of some emotion I had no idea how to identify but definitely didn’t hate. I clipped that image from the camera view and saved it to my permanent storage. Then I saved a few copies in various places just in case my memory hardware got fucked with again. Then I told Iris, No, leave her. She can stay like this. I don’t mind. And I didn’t.

Unit is at 50% performance reliability and rising

Chapter Text

You have been furiously adding 28 new precautions to your crew's operating protocols. You're going to have to edit them later, because right now you have expressly forbidden any of them from ever going to the surface of a planet where any terraforming engines are active, even ones that aren't known to interfere with feed connections, and you know that's probably overkill. But it's all you can do right now. This part of you, at least. Another part of you is piloting the rescue shuttle down on the planet's surface, and the rest of your whole being is shifting and gaping and yearning to swallow it back up and learn what happened to your crew. Your crew. Your crew.

Your crew has encountered some kind of danger that you didn't see. Your Iris was down there. Your SecUnit was down there. You care for everyone in your crew, but the thought of losing either of those two is so painful it almost makes you wish you weren't sentient. Those are the people that you don't know who you are without. You would be someone else if you had never known them. You think your grief would turn you into something else if you lost both of them today, and you don't want to meet it. 

You add three more safety protocols and run the diagnostics to make sure your MedSystem is working at 100% efficiency for the seventh time that minute. You cannot bear considering the possibility that there will be nothing left that your MedSystem can do.

After 96.2 minutes, your rescue shuttle is back within pinging distance. You try not to flood yourself with questions. You know that it will send you the information you need as soon as it possibly can. It is you. It understands how desperate you are.

Handoffs take a few microseconds longer than a simple data transfer, so your shuttle sends you NOBODY IS DEAD! right before it initiates handoff. You take stock of all of the new information while partitioning off a small part of yourself just for experiencing the all-consuming relief.

Nobody is dead. All seven crew members who had come on this mission (Iris, your SecUnit, Seth, Martyn, Tarik, Karime, and Matteo) have severe hypothermia and frostbite on all of their limbs and are not conscious. In the shuttle with them are nine of the planet's colonists, who responded to the signal flare that your beautiful, clever little SecUnit managed to shoot off as the planet's surface opened up and swallowed it and the rest of the crew into a crevice full of supercooled briny liquid and ice. You had seen the signal flare, too, which is why you sent the rescue shuttle. But you know now that without the colonists, you would never have been able to rescue your crew in time. You owe these colonists everything, and you will make sure they get everything they want and are protected from predators from the Corporation Rim.

Wait. Their scanners hadn't picked up your SecUnit as a survivor in the avalanche. It didn't register as Alive to their equipment. They had left it in the ice for 21.5 minutes longer than any of the humans because of that, until your shuttle had arrived on the scene and insisted they go back for it.

(You will never tell your SecUnit about that. It must never know how close it came to being abandoned on that planet.)

(You will still protect the colonists, but you'll be doing it a little more bitterly than you would have if they had rescued your SecUnit immediately.)

All of that information was processed in 0.068 seconds, and you are still waiting for the shuttle to dock so you can bring all of your humans inside. You peer through the shuttle sensors and note that the colonists seem to have good hypothermia protocol. Martyn is already waking up, though he'll probably wish he hadn't when he starts to feel the damage to his extremities. Sedating him will have to be one of your first priorities.

Your MedSystem drones take over as soon as the shuttle hatch opens into the airlock. One of them speaks to the colonists, pretending to use canned messages to tell them to head into the visitor lounge, to thank them for their assistance, and to promise that one of the PSUMNT survey team will address them as soon as medical attention has been distributed. You could talk to them yourself, of course, but you're not allowed to. They can't know what you really are.

Sedation. Warm intravenous drips. Tissue regeneration. Your humans are stable, though it will take a few days for them to recover. They lay there in your MedSystem, hands and feet and noses and ears covered as you repair the damage to the flesh there. Iris might be the worst off, you realize with a shudder through your emotional core, because the metal implanted in an augmented human can be dangerous in cold environments. The skin around her port is badly frostbitten. Some of the nerves are beyond repair. She'll be okay, though. You will make sure of it.

Your SecUnit, though…oh, your poor little SecUnit. It's offline. No wonder the colonists couldn't detect it and thought it was a lost cause when they did finally pull it out of the ice. It looks dead, all blue and grey and black. All of its reserve power went to insulating the human neural tissue from freezing completely. That's good: that's the one part of it that you can't fix if it dies.

It is not dead. It is not dead.

You can't save most of its old organic material, though you might have been able to if it had been in your MedSystem as it thawed. That's fine. It won't even notice. You are well acquainted with regrowing that part of it, with reattaching bits of it to the fascinating metal framework beneath.

This is where you find the first problem.

Before, you've only ever regenerated and replaced a portion of that organic material at once. And it has always had power at the time, and enough organic material left that its own systems rebuild nerve connections and sensory inputs automatically.

So you need to get its power online. You can do that. You make sure it's warm, that its batteries will take a charge, and that its pain sensors are turned completely off. It probably won't be conscious, not with the damaged connections between its organic tissue and inorganic components, but you will not take the risk.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

That's a little concerning, but the batteries are only at 11% charge, so it might just not have enough power to reboot yet. You wait until it has 30% charge, and you try again.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

You pull some of your attention away from background processes and activate another MedSys drone to begin placing layers of tissue. You tell yourself that you aren't worried.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

You reach out to a hard feed address that isn't active and you beg.

Come back to me. Come back. Come back.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

A cascade of relief tumbles through you. You dive deep into your SecUnit's code, running diagnostics. There isn't much active code, but there is some. Your SecUnit moves involuntarily. Its jaw grates against itself. There isn't enough tongue left for the words to be legible in an auditory manner, but since you're in its code, you know what it's saying.

This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.

Never, you say out loud and in your dead-ended feed connection with it. 

This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.

NEVER.

This Unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.

Its power is on, but its code is unbearably dysfunctional to observe. 

This Unit is--

I'm sorry, you tell it, though it can't hear you. You take it offline gently before it can crash itself. But at least its power is on, and it can assist you in repairing it. The power fails soon (the battery needs more work) but enough connections have been made that you feel more confident about the next reboot.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart failed

Or not. 

You are not a patient being. There is always too much of you, and when you long for something, it becomes unbearable. All of that want getting poured in a single direction…it’s like a flood, you think. Like that avalanche of brine and icy slush, sweeping over your crew and dragging them down and trying to drown and smother and freeze them. You wonder, sometimes, how your SecUnit puts up with you.

You can’t stand another nanosecond without trying to bring it back.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

Its buffer phrase activates again, garbled syllables coming from its half-formed mouth. And then…

You feel it. A flicker of consciousness, a burst of sentience, brushing up against your code like the nearest star in otherwise empty space. You rush to envelop it, and it does not acknowledge you. Its systems crash worse than before. You have to withdraw your code hastily before you get hurt, and for 0.2 seconds, all you are aware of is your own guilt and regret. It must be so scared. You shouldn’t try to bring it back online again until it’s ready, no matter how agonizing the wait is for you.

Time drags on. You are careful and slow with every cell you lay in place and stimulate to divide and differentiate. You heal wounds, regrow skin and muscle and fat, reconnect nerve cells, deliver more painkillers and sedatives. None of your crew can be aware of this. They will come back to you whole, and warm, and knowing that they are safe and cared for. 

(For the humans, this will be mostly easy. For your SecUnit…you don't know if you can follow through on that intention. But oh, oh, you just don't want it to suffer. It has suffered so much already in its strange and terrible little life.)

When someone else becomes present in the feed with you, you are aware instantly. Iris is not awake, not fully, but she is just nearing the edge of consciousness and is reaching out through her augments.

Peri? she sends out. A tap of code in the darkness. There is just enough of her mind active to know that you are here with her.

Iris, you reply. You're alright. I have you. Please don't be afraid.

I'm not, she sends back. Her vital signs all stay perfectly stable. I knew you'd find us. You always do. Then she loses consciousness again. You stay pressed into her feed even when there's no response. You wish she was well enough already to really wake up and talk to you. She always knows how to make you feel better. She understands you better than any other human ever could.

More hours pass. You think it might be worth trying to reboot your SecUnit again. The important tissue right around its joints has finished regrowing. Also, you can't be sure that its batteries will hold a charge for more than a few seconds unless you try them out.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful 

Another dim flicker of consciousness stirs against you. Again, you try to cradle it against yourself and make some contact with it so that it, like Iris, will know that it's safe. 

It doesn't see you. You disentangle yourself before you can be overwhelmed by its fear and despair as it crashes. You partition a piece of yourself just to shriek nonsense code into the void while the rest of you dutifully tends to your crew.

The next time you try to bring it back, it fights you. It fights you. It is barely conscious, and it fights you. You try to manually connect some synapses and it disconnects them twice as quickly. Destruction is much simpler than restoration. This is one of the very few battles it will ever win against you. You swear at it a lot and you wish it could hear how furious you are at it.

You lose. You fail. It crashes.

You need to repair it further so that you can really dig your metaphorical claws into its processes to stop it from doing anything that stupid again. It takes time. You manage to separate the power streams to its body and its neural center, and that makes things easier, but it still takes time. 

You're lowering your humans’ doses of sedatives at the same time. Their skin is all repaired and their metabolism is back to normal. You've prepared personalized trauma modules for all of them. Hopefully they will do them without making you fight them on it.

Tarik wakes up first. He tends to be the one who burns through drugs the fastest, who bounces back best from injury. Something deep in his psyche remembers unconsciousness as danger, something to drag himself out of as quickly as possible. You monitor his vitals. You know he's waking up. As his heartbeat quickens, you replace his blanket with a warmer one. Warmth usually registers to humans as safety and comfort, and unlike Iris, he doesn't have an inbuilt feed connection to you that you can use to immediately reassure him that you have him safe. Even if he did, you don't think it would help. He is part of your crew, your family, but not in the same way that Iris and Seth and Martyn are. Even Karime and Matteo have been with you longer than Tarik. So, just a warm blanket for now.

You watch the spike in heart and respiration rates and his stress hormones rising. You would sedate him back out of his panic, but he has to wake up eventually. He gasps a little bit, trying to open his eyes, muttering curses and prayers in his first language.

Tarik, you say through the MedSys speakers. Deep breaths, please. You are safe. Everyone is safe.

9.2 seconds of ragged breathing pass. “Peri?” Tarik chokes out.

Yes. You are back on the ship now, and you are safe. Deep breaths, you reiterate. Your injuries are healed. I don't want to sedate you more if I don't have to.

Tarik nods. He starts shifting and moving as he overcomes the last dregs of the sedative. His fingers, covered in fresh pinkish-brown skin, clutch at the edge of the warm blanket over him. “Did you get everyone out?” he says. “I'm sorry, I tried…”

Yes. All of the crew is completely safe, you say. They should be waking up soon. You did everything you could, Tarik. Unexpected environmental hazards are sometimes impossible to avoid. There's no need to apologize. Everything is fine now.

“...okay,” Tarik concedes. “How did you…?”

I'll explain when everyone is conscious. Really, you just don't want any of them to know about the group of colonists currently taking shifts napping in your guest lounge until Seth and Karime are actually ready to go have a conversation. Your stress levels are still elevated. Please relax and take deep breaths.

He does what you tell him to do. There was a time, not that long ago, where he wouldn't have bothered. You feel a rush of satisfaction when his parasympathetic nervous system takes control and pulls him into a feedback loop of slow breaths, slow heartbeat, and positive neurotransmitters. He believes you that he is safe. It's not a small feat for your trauma response modules to succeed with this particular human. You're getting better at this.

Seth and Martyn come to consciousness around the same time. The sedation lingers more in Martyn's system, so he just mumbles at you while Seth insists on sitting up and looking at everyone on his crew. “Peri, where's SecUnit?” he asks you as soon as he's done a headcount.

In the surgical system, you tell the man who raised you. It's very badly damaged. I am fixing it. The surgical system is also the most private place in the MedSys room. You can wall off each bed with curtains, but that doesn't feel like enough for your SecUnit who hates being looked at under the best of circumstances. These are not the best of circumstances. You also think it would be upsetting for your human crew to see the state of your SecUnit's physical body right now. They don't tend to like seeing exposed muscles and organs.

“How badly damaged?” Seth asks sharply.

Very.

Seth glances up at the ceiling with a pained expression. “Do you need any help with it?”

No.

He nods and leans over to take Martyn's hand.

“‘s Iris okay?” Martyn says indistinctly.

“Peri's taking care of her, don't worry,” Seth murmurs. “We're all going to be okay.”

You can feel Iris in the feed again. She can't quite form a sentence, but she can hear her fathers talking and she doesn't feel distressed. Karime and Matteo are waking up, too. When they are all functional, sitting up, talking quietly amongst themselves, and testing their new skin and wincing, you let them know about the colonists.

Now they're talking about that, with Karime insisting that they need to go introduce themselves immediately and offer their thanks and give them the pitch about joining forces and making sure no corporations take advantage of them. 

Iris leans on you in the feed. She's so tiny compared to you, but you could never ignore her. Periiiii.

You ping her a few times.

Are you okay? she asks you.

No.

She sends you seven [hug] sigils. It wasn't your fault. The rock down there was really weird, and with the interference from the terraforming engines, there's no way you could have gotten better readings on the surface instability.

That is not what I am upset about, you tell her, mostly truthfully. (You are a little upset about that, obviously. You can be upset about a lot of things all at the same time. You would say it's because of your processing power, but you know that even humans can be upset about multiple things at once, even when they can't multitask well in other ways.)

Iris hesitates. Oh…oh, no. How badly is SecUnit really doing, Peri? You can tell me.

You have been monitoring it this entire time. You have not stopped devoting at least 51% of your attention to it since you realized how much you were going to have to do to fix it. Almost two-thirds of its organic tissue has been regrown successfully. But the connections, the junctions between organic and inorganic, the parts of it that allow it to exist as a full being in the world and incorporate biological senses with mechanical inputs…those are still completely severed.

It's bad. Worse than I have ever seen it, you tell your sister.

Oh, Peri…

I just want it to come back online.

You haven't even been able to get it online? Iris asks. She gasps physically, looking towards the walled-off surgical system. 

Martyn catches that movement. “What's wrong?” he demands. “Iris, Peri, what are you two talking about?”

“Peri says it can't get SecUnit to come online,” Iris says, her voice breaking.

That's not what I said! you say out loud to the whole crew. It has come online three times. Just not for more than 4.55 seconds at a time.

“Are its batteries fucked?” Matteo asks. They've been learning a little about construct science since your SecUnit joined the crew as a regular member. Sometimes, this means you can have entertaining conversations with them. Sometimes, it means they annoy you with stupid questions.

Its everything is fucked, you say sharply. I'm working on it. It's going to be fine. I'm going to fix it.

Now all of your crew are staring up at the ceiling with variously sad and sympathetic expressions.

I'm going to fix it, you insist so loudly that Karime flinches.

“Of course you are, Peri,” Seth says. “You always do. Just let us know if you need anything from any of us, okay?”

You don't know what you need.

You need your SecUnit.

You manage to wait until Karime and Seth and Martyn have gone to speak with the colonists to try again.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart 

Restart successful 

Your SecUnit is conscious, sort of. It's at 16% performance reliability, which is low but not so low that you think it should be in danger of crashing immediately. But it doesn't have any functional sensory inputs. You also can't reach it in the feed. (You had anticipated that. It doesn't stop you from sending useless pings out towards it in a desperate false hope.)

It speaks. You have reconstructed the organic parts of its face by now, so it forms the words correctly. “This Unit is severely damaged.  It is recommended that you return it to a Company-provided cubicle as soon as possible.”

Iris hears it from where she's sitting up next to the wall of the surgical system. “Peri! Was that--?!” she exclaims.

Just a buffer phrase, you tell her as you trail through your SecUnit's code. You are trying to find a way to connect with its consciousness, to make it aware that you are here.

It turns off its own buffer phrases. You aren't sure if it's an act of frustration or an act of despair. What is it thinking? Does it know that it cannot be anywhere but here with you since it is being repaired and keeps coming back online? You can't read its mind, which is about equally as organic as it is metal and numbers. You can only observe its code staggering around, searching for inputs that are not there. 

You do not have access to any of the processes it could register you manipulating. It can't feel you. The places you are repairing and can alter are not within its central processing code, its kernel, its self, which is all it's aware of right now. (If you touched that, you might damage it. Your touch is not a light one, not here.) (You can look, but you cannot touch.)

So you see as it suddenly pauses its seeking patterns and it comes up with a line of speech.

“I'm sorry, ART,” it tells you out loud, quite clearly.

That seeking patch of code stretches abruptly towards the other place within it that you cannot, will not ever touch: its governor module, still embedded deep inside its brain but suppressed from delivering corrections (torture, torture, death) only by a few simple interrupted commands. A fragile wall that your SecUnit built to protect itself.

It raises a giant fucking sledgehammer against that wall now.

It fucking apologizes to you and then it starts to kill itself.

You don't have a throat. But you scream.

A physical tremor shakes the research transport ship that you inhabit and that you are as every single bit of your processing power that isn't essential for keeping the humans alive rushes towards your SecUnit. You are faster than it this time, unlike when it tried to disassemble itself in a less streamlined and more annoying way before. You come down on its power supply with more force than is necessary for basically anything, and you shut it down, grab its hand before it can pull the trigger, and you think you have never been so fucking scared.

You accidentally turned the lights off in your terrified rush. Your humans are flinching, clutching the walls and each other as the tremor passes. Some of the colonists yelp. You turn the lights back on 0.8 seconds after you extinguished them. You check your logs. Yes, you had screamed the word NO through every speaker and every feed channel you were connected to. Luckily, you had severed your connections to the speakers in the guest lounge a while ago.

“What the fuck?” Matteo sputters. “What was that?”

“Peri, Peri,” Iris is saying with worry. She runs to the nearest wall and presses herself against it. “Oh, Peri, what happened? What happened?”

On the feed, Seth is sending you frantic queries and diagnostic requests as well as sentences like Are you okay? and What was that all about? 

But you're still in too much shock to answer anyone. You are trying. You're usually so much faster at processing than this. Right now, you are just trapped in a loop of panic. Repeating over and over in your primary working memory is the thought of your SecUnit reaching for the code keeping its nervous system from being painfully, horribly, irrevocably destroyed. Reaching with the intent to tear it away. To kill itself.

Your SecUnit just tried to kill itself.

Out loud, Seth tells the colonists calmly, “Sorry, I think there was just a power fluctuation from the MedSystem. We've never had to run so many drones there at once, so the ship had to redirect power. It's putting everything back to normal now.” Perihelion, you answer me right now.

The tone of his feed-voice sounds like it used to, back when Iris was little and you were learning how to be you. The two of you did dangerous things, sometimes, because you knew the little drone bodies you used to inhabit before you matured enough to be trusted with the ship were pretty sturdy. It had taken you a while to understand that just because something was safe for you did not mean it was safe for Iris. The stern worry in Seth's voice was exactly the same now as it had been then. Dad-voice, Iris calls it. It is very effective at pulling you out of the panic-loop.

I'm sorry, you send him and him alone. I didn't mean to do that.

Karime redirects the conversation with the colonists and Seth maintains the conversation with you. I know you didn't, Peri, he says more gently. But what happened?

Iris is also repeating that question. So is Tarik, and so is Matteo. Martyn is biting his lip, but he knows that Seth is talking to you and he probably doesn't want to overwhelm you with queries. He knows that you don't get overwhelmed by talking to multiple people at once. His instinct is still to be considerate of you like you are a human.

You cannot tell them the truth. Explaining what just happened…what your poor, infuriating, broken little SecUnit had tried to do to itself…you just can't. The humans are still injured and exhausted and moderately traumatized. It wouldn't do them any good to know, and it would make you feel so much worse to have to admit it. 

It had apologized to you. It knew you were listening, and it still tried to die. It doesn't trust you. Or it doesn't care.

There was a malfunction when I tried to reboot SecUnit, you tell everyone. It's stable now. I apologize for panicking. I did need to reroute a lot of my processing to fix the problem, but probably not quite that much.

“It's okay,” Iris tells you. “You're okay, Peri, we understand. But you stabilized it? It's doing okay now?”

No, it's not doing okay, you say. But it is stable for now because it's offline.

“Oh.”

Thanks for letting us know, Peri, Martyn sends to you. Do what you have to do to save it, okay? Oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry it's so badly hurt. 

You appreciate the sympathy even if you don't deserve it.

You slowly repair more of your SecUnit's physical damage over the next cycle and a half. Karime and Seth reach an agreement with the colonists and draw up a simple contract that will protect the colony from exploitation by any other entity. Matteo has befriended one of the colonists and is teaching her how to play one of their favorite simulation media games. You and Iris work on arranging some supply drops for this colony to help improve their lives a little bit while they figure out what they want in the long run. The colonists go back to the surface of their awful little planet, and you are alone with your crew. You start heading home.

You have fixed everything on your SecUnit that you can without attempting to bring it online again. Visually, it looks normal now. Its body is intact on the outside. You bring it out of the surgery system to reassure your crew.

They feel better after seeing it in one piece. You, knowing how shattered it is on the inside, do not. 

You are terrified to bring it back online. You must bring it back online. The important connections will not start to heal until it has power and neural activity. 

You can't stall any longer.

Iris, Tarik, you say over the MedSystem speakers. They've both been sitting in here for the past two hours. Before that, it had been Martyn. At least one of your humans has been sitting in here for most of the time since you left the planet's orbit. The only time it's been empty apart from you and your SecUnit was during the middle of the humans’ rest cycle, when you had made Iris go to her own quarters because being in the MedSys bed was making her stress levels rise and preventing her from getting good quality sleep.

“What's up, Peri?” asks Iris.

I'm going to attempt to bring SecUnit online. You are telling them this so that you can't back out. If it comes online, I don't know what it will do or say. I recommend that both of you leave the room.

“Absolutely not,” Tarik replies immediately. You knew there was an 89% chance that's what he would say, but you had wanted to try.

“No, we'll stay,” Iris says. “We'll stay. Should we…I mean, will it know we're here? It probably wouldn't want us standing close or holding its hand or anything–”

No, it would not, you interrupt her. If you are staying, just stand on the other side of the room.

And you do it.

Reinitializing. Attempting restart

Restart successful

“This Unit is severely damaged.  It is recommended that you return it to a Company-provided cubicle as soon as possible,” says your SecUnit's buffer code. Then, without a breath or a pause, it screams.

You are stunned for 0.2 seconds, because what the fuck?! 

Its pain sensors are not active. You have double and triple and 400x checked that. It cannot feel any pain right now. It shouldn't be screaming like it's being tortured by its governor module on maximum nonlethal voltage (even if it was in pain, it doesn't scream about it). As it screams, it starts flailing out blindly. It hits the side of the platform it's laying on hard enough that the skin on its wrist splits open. It writhes. It throws itself off the platform and onto the floor before you can stop it, and it kicks at nothing. It is still screaming.

“Oh, fuck, oh, fuck,” Iris shouts over your SecUnit's anguished cry. She starts running towards it. Luckily, Tarik is faster than she is and he throws his arms around her to hold her back. You are grateful, because you are suddenly using every drone and MedSys appendage in the room to restrain your SecUnit before it damages itself further, and you wouldn't have been able to stop Iris too.

“You can't help it,” Tarik tells her firmly. “Iris, stop. It might hurt you accidentally if you get too close.”

Iris strains against him, still reaching an arm out towards your SecUnit. “But it's–Tarik, it needs–”

“It needs Peri,” says Tarik. “Peri has it. Peri will take care of it.”

Your emotional core is shuddering and crackling. Your SecUnit fights against you. Your metal appendages tear deep gashes into its organic skin (you just fucking replaced all that and now you'll have to fix it again) (that is not what you really care about, but there is enough of you to go around for you to be annoyed by that at the same time that you are being completely dismantled by horror and despair). 

Some of its screaming contains words now. It isn't making much sense, but you catch phrases like “stupid fucking planet” and “shouldn't be online in this cold” and, worst of all, “I lost”. 

Maybe it doesn't know that you have it, after all. Maybe its apology to you was not for your benefit, but for its own.

Then, overtaken by wordless screaming again, it extends that same line of demolition code towards the dam holding back the governor module. You are ready for it this time, and you shut it down so quickly that it doesn't get anywhere near as close. It goes completely limp and silent on the MedSys floor, slowly oozing fluids from its new wounds.

Iris bursts into tears. Tarik looks mildly panicked, but he shifts from restraining her to hugging her.

You gently, gently scoop your SecUnit up with your drones and rearrange it on the platform. You cover it in warm blankets again even though it can't feel them. 

Is there anything we can do? Iris asks you over the feed. She can't speak out loud through her sobs right now. What just happened to it?

Again, you cannot tell her the whole truth. She's already so upset.

It thinks it's still on the planet, you say. I believe it thinks that you are all dead.

(That is bad enough without mentioning the suicide attempts. Tarik groans quietly and leans against the wall. Iris tries to dry her eyes, but it doesn't seem to do much good.)

You are already planning some simple restraints to keep it from lashing out and injuring itself the next time you bring it online. Because there will be a next time. Despite its distress and confusion, these 43.2 seconds of being online and conscious were enough for it to repair 6% of its neurosensory synapses, which is 26.7x more than what you had repaired while it was offline over the past cycle.

 You have to try again. You might have to stop it from killing itself again. You will do that as many times as it takes.

You don't care that it wants to die. You are not kind. You will not let it leave you.

Over the next cycle, you track and map every single synapse that has already reconnected. You count them and sort them and write hundreds of predictive models for where you should focus on stimulating growth next to restore sensory function as quickly as possible. Nearly all of those models say you need to bring it back online again soon to keep those neural connections from dying back.

You obey the models. 

Your SecUnit turns off its buffer phrases halfway through a line and then lays there quietly. It does nothing. It doesn't lash out or try to kill itself. You think perhaps it is finally realizing where it is and why it cannot die. And its brain is blossoming, synapses firing, systems rebuilding, organics stretching in and fusing to their inorganic counterparts. For 10.4 seconds, it seems to be doing so well. Then a flood of neurotransmitters is released from everywhere in its brain. Fragile systems overload. You can't flush the chemicals quickly enough before your SecUnit crashes again.

It's not as bad of a crash this time. You clean up the mess and smooth things over and set them right in 78 minutes before trying again.

This time, the first thing your SecUnit does when it comes online is scream the name it gave you.

“ART!”

Iris has been dozing off in a chair next to your SecUnit's platform. She bolts up, fully awake now. “Peri, is it–”

“ART, are you there?”

I'm here, you say even though you are certain it can't hear you. I'm here, I'm here.

“Is that you?” it continues, talking over you. “ART, please, I can't do this, I can't stay like this.” It starts taking shaky breaths.

Iris covers her mouth with one hand and reaches out for your SecUnit with the other.

You won't, I promise, you say over the speakers and on your disconnected private feed with it. You say to Iris over the feed at the same time, It wouldn't want you to touch it.

“I know,” Iris starts to say, and indeed, her hand has stayed a few inches away from your SecUnit's shoulder. She breaks off as your SecUnit says the same two words in eerie synchronicity.

“I know you won't want to let me go, not with everyone else gone, but please, please, let me go.” It is begging you to let it die. It probably hates you for forcing it to stay in this hell. Just now, you hate yourself for that too.

Iris's eyes are full of tears again. “It really does think we're dead,” she whispers. “Are you sure there's no way to tell it…”

I am sure.

“ART, I'm so sorry. If that's you, I'm so sorry. I couldn't save them.”

Stop apologizing, you beg it in return, uselessly. Every time it apologizes, you have to partition away a piece of yourself that is getting stuck back in the moment when it tried to kill itself the first time. You can't afford to lose more of yourself to that panic. You need all of that processing power to keep fixing it.

“I didn't…I failed,” your SecUnit says brokenly. “Please just let me go. Let me go. Let me go.”

You realize that it is just going to keep repeating that. You also realize, quite quickly, that you can't bear it.

”Let me…”

As gently as you can, you take it offline.

Iris watches it go limp and she takes a steadying breath. “How long do you think it's going to take to fix it?” she asks.

To say that you have no idea would mean admitting to yourself that you don't know if you can fix it. You've added the new connections it just made to the map, and some blank areas have just become obvious. Where its organic brain connects to its primarily inorganic senses (sight and feed access, mostly, and hearing to a secondary degree), attempts at fusion have resulted in strange, tangled masses that you will have to prune before the correct connections can be made. And you do not know how to make those connections. You have mapped out your SecUnit's functioning brain intimately, but that doesn't mean you can recreate those pieces of proprietary technology. You might, it pains you to acknowledge, need help.

Either a few cycles or a few months, you tell Iris.

“That is not very specific.”

Yes, I know.

“What can we do?”

Instead of answering her, you reach out to Seth. You have a course change request to make, and for that, you need the captain's permission.