Chapter Text
I didn’t understand why I had an emotional response when I found out. I wasn’t even sure exactly what the emotional response was, all I knew was that I wasn’t happy and I needed to let Dr Gurathin know. He was making a mistake. (Those are two separate sentences; I am using punctuation, agressively.)
Pin-Lee was (surprisingly, considering how much the two of them were always fighting) the only one who seemed to understand. Mensah was acting all calm and professional, like the leader she is; and Ratthi was just sad and hurt. But all of them seemed to accept that he was leaving and that none of us could change his mind; it was as if they seemed to think that we shouldn’t. As if they’d been expecting this. Well I didn’t accept it and I hadn’t been expecting it. It was a stupid thing to do: I have mentioned before that humans can be stupid, even my humans. Even the augmented one.
I think I did recognise my emotional response, I was angry.
Three (who had come with us on the responder back to Preservation for “safety reasons”, I’m not sure whose safety either) was not helpful.
“The human who you don’t like is leaving Preservation, so you likely won’t see him again, ever.”
“Augmented human.”
It didn’t say anything but it somehow managed to shrug over the feed. I think Murderbot 2.0 was a bad influence.
“I don’t understand why he has to leave.” I said. My voice took on that distinctive timbre. I hate it when my voice sounds whiny like that, like a human child. I suspect whoever designed SecUnit vocalisations did this on purpose.
“You’re planning on spending more time away from Preservation. Now you’re annoyed when someone else does the same thing; and it’s someone ‘you don’t like’?” It made the words sound as if they had quote marks around them. If it had been Amena speaking she would have made little marks in the air with her fingers. It had been spending too much time with Amena. Luckily Amena was asleep. For some reason I knew that when she found out, it (‘it’ being Gurathin leaving Preservation and never coming back) would, in that weird adolescent logic, turn out to be my fault. Three was almost as illogical as a human. The most irritating thing about Three right now was the expression on its face, which wasn’t of one who ‘didn’t understand’, not at all.
The next day demonstrated I was right about adolescent humans. Amena was sad/angry and for some reason I was the person she was angry with. Not at first; when I told her Gurathin was planning to leave Preservation to take up a post at some stupid polity’s university she initially didn’t believe that ‘Uncle Gurathin’ would really do that and told me I’d misunderstood. Then she went and spoke to Dr Mensah for a long time and when she came out her face was all blotchy and slightly swollen; when she saw me she turned around and stamped off to her room. I am not chasing after children.
At least Mensah had agreed with me that we should try and get back to Preservation Station in the responder as soon as we could, so I would speak to him before we left. It’s not as if you can accelerate when you’re in transit in a wormhole, but I think it was the thought that counted.
I found Pin-Lee drinking intoxicants with some of the crew in one of the small lounges. They all apparently needed to be somewhere else soon after I arrived (I am not stupid: I did notice, I was just glad they were gone so I didn’t mention it). If this continued I might consider going into shutdown for the rest of the journey back to Preservation, but it was only 56 hours. The amount of intoxicants Pin-Lee was imbibing indicated she had reached the same conclusion. I suppose that’s why Dr Gurathin had put a time-lock on the message. Because the humans would be upset. He wouldn’t expect me to be, and I wasn’t. I was just having a stupid emotion.
Pin-Lee wanted to tell me all these stories about how annoying Dr Gurathin was. Which sounds exactly like something I would enjoy; but instead we both kept falling into silences. She’d remember something, like how angry she’d been when he’d announced, without even confiding with her beforehand (and he should have confided in her, I didn’t understand why he hadn’t) that I’d hacked my governor module. But all that did was remind us about how he had actually been right, and how frightening it must have been for him, and (actually) how brave (as well as stupid) that had been of him. To suspect they had a rogue SecUnit and to put himself, metaphorically, between the rest of the survey and it. That was Pin-Lee’s way of looking at it. I wasn’t sure it was completely true, but he had been very brave. Even I remember thinking that.
Stupid too, yes. He has been extremely stupid. But brave. Even when I held him up by the neck, he hadn’t seemed afraid. He’d seemed almost relieved. Most humans are so terrified of SecUnits that if one did that they’d lose control of certain biological functions. Not look relieved. Then he’d just gone to sort out HubSystem with Pin-Lee; he had even asked the others if they’d be all right. He wasn’t thinking about himself then, so why was he doing this now?
I do delete a lot of my records (I need to increase my media storage, note to self: ask ART about this when it’s not being an asshole) after a while, but I’d saved a large proportion of our interactions, mine and Gurathin’s that is. Dr Gurathin is the only augmented human I’ve spent a lot of time with. The only augmented human colleague I’ve ever had. It’s useful to have saved data to help understand the way we interact. Or it should be. Even after Pin-Lee went to sleep off the intoxicants I sat watching. He had always just been there, being annoying; I never thought he’d leave. He was just there being an asshole, saving the team, saving me, by staying calm. And making snarky comments about me being passive aggressive.
“They can’t take you away from us. Dr. Mensah will not allow it.”
Now he was taking himself away.
The last few hours in transit were just painful. Everyone was treating me so strangely. Even Ratthi. I almost wanted to crawl into a cubicle. Which I don’t have. And I didn’t have ART; it had needed more work on the alien remnant contamination. Not that I wanted it with me; it would probably just be an asshole. It hadn’t met Gurathin, but when I’d spoken about him it had sometimes been mean. Perhaps it was better that it wasn’t here.
Eventually we docked. It seemed Dr Gurathin had meant to avoid goodbyes. There were only a few hours left before his shuttle was due to leave, he was actually waiting to board it. Then I wondered if he knew this would happen, if he’d set it all up. Make me hurry to the docking area to ask him to stay. I thought about this angrily as I made my way through the station with a small cloud of drones; lots of the humans I passed were surprised to see me there. Well I’m surprised to be here too. Ask Dr-asshole-Gurathin about it, why don’t you, if he hasn’t already left.
He hadn’t left. I saw him sitting alone, reading some sort of journal quietly to himself in the feed. He didn’t have any idea I was there. I had closed my feed presence right down to prevent him noticing me. I wasn’t sure now what I wanted to say to him. I considered just watching him leave and not saying anything. I think if I did that Amena might explode. Not literally, obviously. It was nice watching him, without him knowing I was there. He sipped his revolting drink and smiled slightly, I think it was at something in the paper, not the drink.
I knew I was actually going to have to at least show him I was there. Which was unusual, I’ve spent most of my existence avoiding catching the attention of humans. And augmented humans. I walked over to where he was sat. He looked up; I think he thought (at first) that I was just some human wondering if there was a space at his table (which there was, he didn’t have any friends to come and say goodbye to him). When he saw it was me (he didn’t even need to look at my face) he didn’t remain calm. He was not relieved to see me at all. All the colour drained from his face and the hand holding his drink sort of twitched and I thought he was going to spill it. So I went to catch the container it was in, and instead (because he was moving so erratically) I sort of brushed against (or briefly even sort of held) his hand. Which felt very odd. Almost as if there had been a static charge buildup, but my diagnostics indicated there hadn’t been. But it must have felt odd to Gurathin too, because he jerked away from me, and the drink. Somehow I caught the drink and put it down on the table.
Hardly any of it was spilt.
This wasn’t at all how I had expected this to go.