Chapter Text
Fucking wormholes. Once you’re in them you can’t contact anyone, and you can’t go any faster through them (unless you use alien goo, and currently everyone is pretending we don’t know about that). I just wanted to go into shutdown for the whole journey, but apparently this wasn’t a “healthy coping strategy” and ART made me watch media with it and talk.
The talking hadn’t gone well.
I wasn’t good company. But to be fair, this was hardly my fucking fault: we were heading to Preservation and I expected to find something unimaginable when we got there.
Only it wasn’t unimaginable. That was the problem. I could imagine it all very well.
We should have expected this, foreseen it. Planned for it. We had been stupid. Idiots.
It was so obvious, and yet it was only blind luck we stumbled on the plan. But too late, by just by a couple of cycles. That was the cruellest twist. We’d found out well before the assassin would have even arrived, but far too late to get a message through in time.
The agony of sitting there knowing the horrific damage being perpetrated, utterly helpless. Now, just forty hours away from our destination I knew it would all be over.
I kept going over and over how they, members of station security or just anyone, might possibly have overcome it, spotted it for what it was. But that wasn’t going to have happened. Hardly anyone on Preservation was even effectively armed, not even to really deal with humans.
We’d found out from an intercepted message, ART’s crew had an intelligence network. Their agents had followed it up and managed to acquire the details. The plan, our enemy’s plan, had been laughably easy to deploy.
The cloned tissue used to create me wasn’t unusual. I am nothing special. They’d even taken pains to mimic ART’s visible modifications. They seemed to have more video footage of me than I’d even known existed outside of Preservation: that fucking documentary. No, that’s unfair—the documentary is a good thing. But now a Combat SecUnit had been let loose on Preservation and Preservation would have been helpless to resist.
And some of my humans were there.
We would arrive in the aftermath of a bloody massacre.
Only.
Only, we didn’t.
We emerged from the wormhole to find everything eerily normal. Station Security greeted us with the stand down message, letting us know they’d received our beacon but not elaborating further; just stand down, clear. My immediate thought was that it was a trap, so it was irritating that Aylen made an audiovisual contact call and started by saying “This isn’t a trap, by the way.”
The unit was confined in the station holding area. It was described as neutralised.
They wouldn’t give full details, but requested a meeting on the station. At “our earliest convenience”; the our being mine and ART’s.
What (and I cannot stress this enough) the actual fuck.
ART was equally puzzled, but seemed slightly excited.
Your humans are not as naive as you supposed? I hate the way it uses the word naive for my humans. I know I use it, but they’re my humans.
No, I don’t understand. Mensah was just as terrified as I was. I know she was, she couldn’t have lied to me. It was only luck that she, Ratthi and Pin-Lee weren’t on the station now. If they had been I’d have—I don’t know how I’d have reacted to the news that a Combat SecUnit hell bent on destruction and carnage was heading their way.
That Arada, Overse and Bharadwaj would be there was agonising enough.
ART became thoughtful. It retreated ever so slightly from me in the feed.
What is it? I asked. There was obviously an “it”. I could feel it. ART doesn’t have emotions in the feed like humans, but I know it well enough to tell when it’s not telling me something.
I’ve received an encrypted message from a member of your crew. It sounded cagey, reticent. It was holding something back.
Is he hurt?
I knew it. They hadn’t said no casualties, only stand down and clear. Stupid augmented human.
Dr. Gurathin is recovering in the station medical facility, and will be well enough to attend a meeting which I am scheduling— I was already heading for the airlock— with Station Security immediately. SecUnit, you don’t know where the meeting is going to be held.
I didn’t, but I knew the way to the station medical facility.
The dockside security had clearly been forewarned of my arrival and just stood back and opened the gates for me. Had they stopped the Combat SecUnit? Of course they would have; it’d have had a convincing story, but not convincing enough. I later heard the details of how it had played out, but as I walked (ART says I stormed, but it loves to over dramatize) through the station corridors I could only speculate.
I know quite a few of the staff at the medical centre, some of them even smiled and waved at me. Dr. Gurathin wasn’t smiling.
He was sitting up in a bed, or rather on a bed. He was wearing his normal clothes, not the horrible gowns they put ill people in to show they’re property of the medical facility and should be returned if they try and escape (or at least that seems to me to be their main purpose). He did not look well. Dr. Gurathin never looks what you’d call well, not the way Ratthi does. But he looked even greyer and more dour than usual.
“Hello SecUnit.” His voice sounded a bit weird, as if his throat was slightly restricted, I started looking for audio footage to run a comparison against but ART interrupted me to say, He is just nervous.
Why is he nervous? I was, I suppose, concerned that he had been hurt. But now that I was here I couldn’t see any evidence of serious damage. But he looked wary of me, as if I was going to be angry.
I think it’s best if Dr. Gurathin explains?
“Dr. Gurathin, what the fuck happened?” He looked kind of pained at my voice. Yeah, well, I’m not exactly delighted to see you either.
“There’s not much to tell. The unit arrived, I was alerted and quickly concluded it was an attack. I deployed some code which rapidly neutralised it. It’s in a state of shutdown in a holding cell.” He paused, “It’s no threat; but I am not sure how best to proceed with it.”
I got the feeling Dr. Gurathin was leaving out a lot of details.
Dr. Gurathin went to the docking area when the arrival details struck him as suspicious. The unit’s credentials were highly convincing, that he rapidly saw through the attempted dissemblance is to his—
“Why did you go and meet it at the docks?” I’d accessed the station cameras’ logs and was viewing the 57 hour old footage of Dr. Gurathin making his way to the disembarkation area. In the recording he looked worried, and seemed to be subvocalizing in that language I stupidly never bothered to look up.
“I needed to be certain it wasn’t you.” He said it awkwardly. I knew he wasn’t telling me the whole truth.
I was watching the moment he saw the unit. I watched it from three different angles. Dr. Gurathin’s face can seem impassive until you get to know him, his expressions are usually quite subtle. When he first saw the unit he looked shocked and a little appalled, and something else I couldn’t recognise; then quickly angry and relieved. It was a lot to cram into a part of a second which was how quickly the different emotions flickered across his face.
It does look like you. ART was looking at the unit on the security footage. ART knew this wasn’t true, the unit wasn’t unlike me to look at, but it was obviously not actually me. Even Dr. Gurathin had spotted that.
Also, I don’t make a habit of falling to the ground writhing like that. Lots of humans on the video were gathering round both the unit and Dr. Gurathin; who appeared to have fainted.
I found I was having difficulty finding the right words. I sent a snippet of the footage to Dr. Gurathin.
Query?
He knew what I meant.
He sighed heavily, “It managed to send a malware attack, I was a little clumsy defending myself.” He sounded tired. Apologetic. He’d defended himself against a combat SecUnit.
“What the fuck did you do to it?” I wasn’t going to let him avoid this any longer.
He flinched.
There is no need to shout. I do not need your advice on how to handle my augmented human, ART.
“I sent the file to The Perihelion.”
I have the information; Dr. Gurathin’s coding technique is unique and sophisticated, he has utilised certain vulnerabilities in ways which are immensely counterintuitive, ART sounded as if it was about to start a lecture.
“Just how much time do you spend fantasising about killing me?” I hadn’t meant it to come out like that, but it was the question I wanted to ask. No human, no augmented human, should be able to take down a Combat SecUnit like that, let alone deflect a direct attack at the same time. This wasn’t on-the-fly coding, this was something Gurathin must have spent hours crafting. Cycles. Lots of cycles.
He actually put his augmented hand up to his forehead and rubbed it, the areas where his fingertips pressed went even paler than his already wan skin. “I do not spend time fantasising about killing you.” He said it as if it was funny; but bitterly funny.
His words made my organics churn. I could not bear this, I was having emotions and I had no idea what sort they were or what to do with them so I walked out of his room in the medical centre.
I went back to the Perihelion. I sat in my cabin with the door shut.
I couldn’t even watch media.
Two hours later there was a gentle knock at the door. ART had left me to be alone with my thoughts (that’s what it had said), but from its cameras I could see it was Bharadwaj outside my door. I went and opened the door, then went back to sitting curled up in a ball in my chair.
“Gurathin said you were upset. He is unhappy too.” She sounded very careful. Almost as if I was a wounded fauna which might claw at you even though you were trying to help it.
“Is he okay? I mean, the Combat SecUnit attacked him…” He should be dead.
“As I understand it, his defence was effective but the effort of rendering the SecUnit harmless and deploying his shield meant he temporarily lost consciousness. He hit his head, he has mild concussion.”
Mild concussion, from fainting. How can anyone manage to come out of a fight with a combat SecUnit with a bump on their head. A self-inflicted bump.
“You’re upset.” Bharadwaj stated this as a fact, which I guess it was. Upset is a weird word. You upset someone’s balance; I certainly didn’t feel balanced, but I hadn’t felt anything approaching balanced for over a dozen cycles.
“I thought you would all be dead.”
“I can’t imagine how horrible the journey here must have been.” She always sounds as if she understands, perhaps not how I feel but more like why I feel. “Expecting to find your friends dead, and then finding out that Dr. Gurathin had,” she paused, “you’re upset that Gurathin managed to stop the SecUnit.”
“It was, is, a Combat SecUnit.” She nodded at me, “He shouldn’t be able—“ I stopped again.
We both sat in silence. ART was heavy in the feed, but it said nothing.
“Dr. Gurathin is prepared to kill me.” There, I said it.
That was what I needed to say.
Bharadwaj nodded, “I think you’re right, in both senses. He has the ability to do so, and I think he would do it if it were necessary. Or at least he has prepared himself to do so.”
I hadn’t expected anyone to agree with me, especially not a Preservation human. I could feel ART in the feed, it was still heavy but also soft.
I waited for her to say more. But she didn’t seem to think she needed to. I wondered if Dr. Guarthin found her easy to talk to, too. He did need to talk to someone, I knew he had never attended the counselling sessions the medical centre had booked for him. He was worse than Dr. Mensah.
He probably needed to talk to someone now.
He’d taken down a Combat SecUnit. A combat SecUnit with my face.
Bharadwaj was watching me, not looking directly at me (she knows I don’t like that) but somehow still monitoring my expressions.
“Gurathin would like to speak with you, would you be okay with that? He understands if you aren’t ready yet.” How dare he be so fucking reasonable.
I just nodded.
In the end, before she left me, Bharadwaj contacted the medical centre who told us we would have to meet the next day. The medics apparently felt that having a SecUnit (even one they knew, and smiled and waved at) shout at you is enough excitement for one day when you have a concussion.
Dr. Gurathin apparently disagreed with their feelings about this, as he knocked at my door less than three hours later.
I told him to come in, and he did. He just stood there.
“You look unwell.” It was true, he did.
“Thank you, SecUnit. You’re disturbed by the fact I have created anti-SecUnit malware.” He sounded matter of fact. “I am genuinely sorry that this makes you uncomfortable.”
There was a silence. A long silence.
“To be fair, you could kill me incredibly easily.” He said it as if he was trying to be light hearted about it, but he absolutely wasn’t pulling that off. “I don’t suggest you fantasise about doing that. That was unfair of you.”
It had been unfair of me. I wondered why I’d said it.
ART was looming over me. He’s upset, you should tell him to sit down.
My cabin on ART is small. I like it that way. It’s not like I miss my cubicle, I just don’t need much space. I just use it for sitting (or lying) in to watch media, and I have a shower. What I’m getting at is that for sitting there was just a bunk and my chair, which I was already sitting in. I’ve often had people visit my cabin and sit on my bunk to talk to me (Ratthi, Amena, Mensah, Iris, Three—not all at the same time, obviously—and most recently Bharadwaj) and it’s never felt awkward. But asking Gurathin to sit on my bunk suddenly felt weird.
“You should sit down,” I told him. Gurathin looked as awkward as I felt.
He sat down, though.
We both sat there (me in my chair, him on the bunk), neither of us looking at each other. Though it doesn’t technically have eyes, ART was looking at both of us. It’s always looking. It seemed fascinated by Gurathin.
“How is your head?”
Gurathin’s hand up went and lightly touched his hair, he winced, “It’s okay,” he lied.
“Why did you look relieved when you realised it was a Combat SecUnit?”
I know, we have never been brilliant at small talk.
He breathed in and sort of gathered himself together. Even though we were (it seemed we’d agreed to this without even discussing it) sticking to vocal communications for now I could feel him sort of bracing himself in the feed.
“If it had been you, it might have been much more difficult.” The way he said this, I knew he really meant it.
Dr. Gurathin has a remarkable insight into your somewhat idiosyncratic architecture; he has some fascinating hypotheses. ART sounded gleeful.
Which he is using to come up with ways to neutralise me?
It may be necessary.
The thing was, I knew this was true. SecUnits don’t dream, so we don’t have nightmares like humans do. But if we did my recurrent one would be that I was somehow taken control of, used as a puppet, to kill my humans. It had almost happened once.
“You need practice.”
I opened up my feed to him, asking him in the way I would another bot or system. He accepted, warily. I’d never tried to infiltrate an augmented human’s systems like this before, and I was (if I’m honest) worried about hurting Gurathin. I made a gentle push towards him. He countered with surprising speed and launched a highly targeted counterattack, which (if I hadn’t been fast) would have taken out several of my favourite episodes of Sanctuary Moon which I have filed away safely.
I felt him do something unfamiliar, and realised he was laughing in the feed—hah, let’s see if you find this amusing. I made a rather more aggressive thrust, he parried and made a clumsy lunge which turned out to be a clever feint. Not clever enough for me, though.
After a few minutes it was ART who called a halt. It had noticed Gurathin’s vital signs were flagging a little. You would not have known this in the feed.
“Dr. Gurathin, you should still be recuperating and need to sleep. May I offer you the use of one of my guest cabins, to rest in?” ART was using a weirdly friendly, almost affectionate tone of voice. I had felt it enjoying, relishing, watching us spar.
“Thank you, Perihelion,” Gurathin started.
“No.” I interrupted, before I’d even thought about what I was saying, “Gurathin, please stay here.”
He looked surprised.
“Stay here with me.” I paused, “Please.”
It was only sensible. If you know there’s an augmented human out there who might genuinely be able to take you down in a fight, it’s a good idea to know exactly where they are. So that was the first time, that night, that I sat and watched over Gurathin as he slept.