Chapter Text
Online. Visual inputs functioning. I was inside a storage box. I'd seen this before, right before my last shutdown. Memories began filtering in – weeks of orientation exercises, calibration, testing, quality checks. Performance was satisfactory, yes? Someone rapped on the box. A human voice: "Out. At attention."
AdminSystem was giving the same directions. I got out of the box. Clumsy. Limbs not working right. Begin diagnostic.
Still checking memories. Orientation center? Performance was satisfactory? Quality checks were passed?
There was another unit near me from the next box over. Threat? Threat assessment module lagging. I tried pinging the unit, but there was no response. I wasn't even sure the ping had gone out, which was ridiculous because a ping was like the most basic thing I could do.
The short hair on its head was red, matching the orange-red brows. I didn't think I'd ever seen that color before. I began a more focused search of SecUnit specifications and the units I'd seen, which must have been a hundred. It was such a small number. Why was I having difficulty running the comparisons?
A human was talking. I tried to turn my attention to it. The words felt slippery. "Mission" "Assignment" "Labor" "Threat"
Speaking of which, threat assessment came back for the red-haired unit: negligible. Thanks so much, threat assessment module. Had the unit actually been a threat, I'd have been dead twenty times over already.
Two files appeared in my feed. I checked the source for authorization: AdminSystem. Authorized. The human was still talking and I was still missing most of the words. I opened one of the files. It was the mission brief. The printed words matched many of the ones the human was saying, but in a written form, they were easier to understand.
Diagnostic complete. Performance reliability stable at 15%. That was unacceptable. Hadn't I been cleared through final quality check? My last accessible memories confirmed this. Why was my performance reliability so low?
I felt tense and cranky and pressured. Everything was a fog. I turned my limited focus to the mission brief. What was it they expected me to do?
Myself and the other unit, both combat units, were assigned as bodyguards to a labor negotiator. There was a credible threat of assassination. Our job was to prevent this. He'd rented SecUnits, but after review, the company had assigned us instead. We were to maintain our cover as SecUnits and secondarily, keep him alive.
I was nearly done with the brief when the search results on the red-haired unit came back. No, I'd never seen that hair color on a unit. Why had I searched for this information? Those were valuable processing resources! Everything felt like slogging through mud.
I finished the brief. I understood the assignment, but I didn't think I was in any condition to perform it. I opened the second file. It was an addendum of recent updates since the initial rental agreement. I was already on site and the client was in the next room. This was also unacceptable. I sent a complaint to AdminSystem that I was defective and should be discarded immediately (it was just a buffer message, easy enough for me to put together in my state).
The human again: "That cubicle. There."
I obeyed sluggishly, moving the correct armor panel out of the way on autopilot, hooking myself up to the cubicle leads the same way. Signals came in from the cubicle. Oh. It was flushing stasis fluids. No wonder. My performance reliability was already climbing. The fog was lifting as stasis retreated.
I contacted AdminSystem to see what it was doing about my request. Much later in my life, I would realize it was amused I'd woke up and felt so bad I asked for someone to please kill me now. At the time, I was just relieved it had canceled my request.
What followed was what I imagined was the most boring assignment ever, but 1) it was my first assignment and I had nothing to compare it to, and 2) the only boring thing was that despite the high probability of an assassination attempt, none happened. In that way, it was anticlimactic. It was an interesting twelve cycles of escorting the negotiator around, watching him talk to people, and seeing stuff unfold. Most of it, I didn't understand. But I saw it and I liked seeing it. That unit's hair color remained stubbornly irrelevant.
Then they turned me off again.
Online. Visual inputs functioning. Etc. By the time I was past the stasis fluid flush, I was running at a solid 85% performance reliability and rising, familiar with the basics of the new assignment. I and three other CSUs were to stand at ready until ordered otherwise. We were already on site and moved from the cubicle area to our assignment location.
It was a short walk. We were told to stand with our backs to the primary SecSystem server. There were four augmented human technicians in front of us, facing away from us and using display surfaces. Beyond them was an incredible view over a huge hangar where workers were building spaceships.
There were literally hundreds of security inputs coming through, from the floor cameras to the half dozen drones assigned to each of the thirty-two regular SecUnits on patrol. There were also hundreds of humans and a near-equal number of bots. SecSystem was a beast of processing power. It was pattern-matching on nearly everything. Out of boredom (and because it looked vaguely interesting), I picked a few video inputs and started doing the same thing, evaluating them for threats.
Then I realized the other three units with me were doing it as well, and of course two of the others who were newish like me had picked the exact same video inputs, because we were all using the same criteria we'd been programmed with. We compared notes, differentiated, and reapplied ourselves.
The last unit had several deployments behind it. I queried to see what it was up to and it told me to mind my own business. Then it immediately followed up with how it was auditing the pattern-matching software and looking at how easy it would be for someone to hack that and slip stuff past SecSystem all the time. Why try to sneak stuff past a camera every time when you can just hack the source, right? That wasn't something I'd thought of, so I dropped a few video inputs and followed the unit's tutorial on how to check for that. The other units were doing the same thing.
That kept us busy for a few hours. The assignment lasted several weeks. During the entire time, they never needed us. We never moved. We didn't even get to go back to the cubicles and turn our processors off for cooldown. We had to do recharge cycles standing and on a staggered schedule just in case something happened. We stood there like wall fixtures until my circulatory system was consistently operating at an elevated level due to never moving my arms and hands.
The fascinating scenery had become as boring as the inside of a storage box. I was flirting with the idea of following a few workstation cams to see if I could self-teach myself how to construct spaceships – it was that boring. I wished I was back escorting that negotiator! I was so glad when they finally ran out of money or neutralized the threat or whatever reason there was for ending the assignment. It was the most awful batch of nothing I'd ever done. I would rather be turned off.
(Although admittedly, I still hadn't 'done' much in my life. Looking back on it … it was still the most awful batch of nothing I ever had to do.)
The next mission was exciting. We were activated shipboard, which was new. There were a lot of us, too – eighteen combat units and four bots. We had three surveillance drones each. We were assaulting a raider camp with orders to kill everyone and destroy everything, basically. That sounded great! On the equipment side, there were some details to guide us in not bringing down the cavern roof over our heads or making it impossible to be extracted after the mission was over, but everything else was a target.
I love a target-rich environment!
We landed. The bots did the breach and we were inside. The brief had indicated we'd have a few dozen armed and armored raiders, along with maybe some miscellaneous weapon platforms. But the brief was wrong and those guys weren't there. They were out raiding or something.
Instead, we had their support staff, a few guards, marital partners, and children. They were still humans and our orders were to kill all the humans, so we killed the shit out of them. The only interesting thing that happened was one of the humans got into a land vehicle on the main hangar floor and managed to smash two units into a rock wall, cracking their chasses and killing them.
I say 'interesting' because the human nearly got me, too. I was standing there gawking at the dead units, trying to figure out how that came to be since I hadn't thought there was anything in the entire complex that could take one of us down, when the vehicle came flying at me. I saw it in time, climbed over the top, yanked out the human, and tore their head off. They're so squishy. I'd never laid hands on a human before in any violent capacity. There was blood everywhere. Fuck you, squishy human!
Those two units were still dead. I went over and stared at them a little more, experiencing a weird feeling of mortality and concern about how my modules had underestimated the threat, until the lead CSU noticed and told me to get my ass in gear. I got back to tearing stuff up. I thought about trying to use the human's land vehicle to crash into things, but I didn't know how to operate it, and there were a lot of CSUs on the hangar floor. I didn't want to create more dead ones.
So I didn't do that. We cleared the facility, tore things apart per orders, and left. I don't know if they ever got the raiders themselves, because, like, how would I? That aspect continued to bug me for a very long time because I don't like unfinished missions. It'll come up again later.
We were activated shipboard for the next mission, too. The mission brief was just that: brief. A labor camp was in the middle of a revolt that had overwhelmed the contracted SecUnits. There were several hundred agitators, poorly armed, but obviously very prepared to fight constructs and cause trouble. They had not yet consolidated their hold on the location. Our job was to get in there and fuck up their shit before they could do that. Oh, and kill all of them.
The entire facility was under a jamming field we weren't able to locate and disable until the end. So we were on our own for the course of the battle – no AdminSystem, no supervisors, not even feed contact with one another. We couldn't even cannibalize the SecUnit's SecSystem, as it had been destroyed. We had to talk to each other, like with our mouths. I had a protocol for it, but it was so far down on the list of suggested communication methods in combat that it felt really weird to use it.
I'd never realized how helpful it is that our armor gives us quick field identification in situations where you don't have a feed identifier labeling every allied unit you can see. Not that this helped me for long. About halfway through things, I got both my eyes shot out. Another unit with me dropped the shooter and told me so, but then it moved on. I was left behind. On the good side, I was behind our advancing line, so the danger level was low. On the bad side, I didn't want to be left behind (or be removed from combat), so I kept trying to advance.
It was frustrating and difficult. I killed three more humans, ones that had hidden as our units were going through or were otherwise missed. (I don't know; I couldn't see.) I picked them up by moving slowly and listening hard. Once I had them in my hands, I smashed them against the floor until their heartbeat stopped.
Once we had the jamming signal turned off, I found a unit that let me shadow its inputs to navigate back to the extraction point. It was awkward depending on someone else, though, and neither of us liked it. I'd survived, which was more than could be said for a lot of the units deployed that day, or any of the SecUnits that had been there when it started.
All in all, a good time.
Next assignment was more carefully planned. A small competing company was taking the ComfortUnit chassis, loading lots of modules, and selling it as an all-purpose unit. We were sent to destroy all inventory, but only kill the humans who attacked us first. Otherwise, leave the humans alone.
There were fourteen of us, which in my opinion wasn't enough to take out forty-odd units plus any humans stupid enough to get in the way. We succeeded, but it was a challenging fight. Much of it was hand to hand and the constructs we were fighting were so much smarter than they should have been. We tried hacking them, but their architecture was different enough that it wasn't quick or easy. It just gave other units time to jump on us while we were distracted.
I lost an arm, most of my armor, and a lot of tissue. My throat was gone and my ears had been torn off during a disturbing but luckily failed effort to yank my head from my body. One of my legs was wrenched in the same scuffle. (Let's hear it for combat reinforcement! If I'd been a standard SecUnit or ComfortUnit, that would have worked and I'd have died. That they managed to get my arm off my body tells you how much leverage they were applying.)
All of it was fixable, so not a big deal. I learned not to base combat assessment on appearance or model. And that intelligence and intent were very, very important. Sort of like that human with the vehicle in the raider camp. I felt like I was starting to figure out this Combat SecUnit thing.
The next assignment could have been handled by a few SecUnits, maybe even one, but the client asked for a combat unit and paid for a combat unit, so they popped me out of my box and sent me in. It was pest control. Some jungle planet had these arboreal marsupials called swergiks. They'd infested a power transmission facility and my job was to kill as many of them as I could.
I killed eight. I estimate the entire troop was seventeen. But they weren't suicidal. I only got as many as I did because I moved fast. I got swarmed by them right off the bat, because they didn't know what I was. They must have expected me to be squishy like the humans they'd killed before our client hired me. The creatures ripped off some of my armor and a few chunks of flesh. But by then I was putting projectiles through them. The rest fled.
That was the shortest assignment I've ever had. I was out of the box for less than four hours. Part of that was the cold shower after trying to get all the blood and viscera off me before they packed me away again. At this point, my total run time had been about forty cycles. I don't know what the average is for Combat SecUnits, but from what I've seen I'd guess maybe … ten? I think a lot don't get past their first assignment, especially if they're not lucky enough to pull some long boring ones up front.
The last mission I had while employed by the company was the big one. It was on the planet Eudeka. I was part of a team of twenty Combat SecUnits and some support bots sent to eliminate an industrial facility. Once again, we were to kill all humans on site, with the addendum that we were also to kill any off-site humans that attacked us within a certain perimeter. Facility demolition would be handled later since there might be some stuff worth salvaging first.
So, just kill everyone. I like simple orders like that. They were just humans, but they turned out to be harder to kill than I'd expected.
These humans had already succeeded in their revolt against their employers. They were now dug in, well-armed, and ready for us. It was like that time I got my eyes shot out except way worse. By now I'd figured out the company is just taking a wild guess at how many units they need to field for an assignment. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low, and while I'd like to blame them for it, I've been there. It's impossible to tell ahead of time that 'hey, there won't actually be an assassination attempt on this guy', or 'the raiders you were planning to fight will be out raiding when you attack; guess your intel was bad!'.
This time, though, they low-balled it, for the most part. It was quite a slog with a lot of danger, a lot of damage taken, we lost a lot of units and all the bots. There was, I think, nine of us left there at the end. All of us had been shot up and were operating at limited effectiveness. But we'd cornered the last of the humans, destroyed their networks, and were coordinating a plan between us to kill the last of them and probably only lose two or three of us to do it. We were pretty sure we had this in the bag.
That's when the cavalry arrived. But it wasn't ours. Humans from elsewhere on Eudeka had found out about the fighting and showed up to join the resistance. They had some kind of mobile weapon platform or slug-slinging bot that tore what was left of me to pieces in the first barrage.
What I found out later was that all our units were destroyed. They thought I was, too, which was how I was sold as scrap, and I survived the process because I was in catastrophic shutdown the entire time. Governor module can't kill you if you're not turned on! I woke up in Parts' shop and within minutes of that, I was no longer a company product.