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"Are these drones new?"
It was kind of a dumb question, but Dr. Bharadwaj had asked it for a smart reason. It had been her third so far in the 147 seconds since she'd greeted me at the door to her office, following directly on the heels of her second, "Is there anything you'd like to talk about today?" which I never really knew how to answer. (Her first question was always "Good [time of day], SecUnit, how are you?" which I didn't really know how to answer either, but "Fine" seemed to suffice most of the time.) This question was dumb because the drones she was indicating didn't look at all like the small intel ones Mensah had bought for me. There were three, and they were larger, about the size of my fist, and were silver instead of black, and had the yellow logo of a local news company printed on the sides. It was a smart question, though, because it gave me something to say.
"I acquired them from a journalist fifty-six hours ago," I told her. Stating facts like this was kind of like giving a report, as opposed to small talk. "Said journalist failed to heed warnings to leave the council offices and call to request an appointment for an interview with Dr. Mensah. I ejected them from the premises, and kept the drones to ensure that none of the footage that had already been recorded wound up on the newsfeeds."
"You stole them."
Coming from someone like Indah or Gurathin, that would have been an accusation. But Bharadwaj was smiling slightly from one side of her mouth, in an amused sort of way. "Let's say 'confiscated,'" I acquiesced. The smile widened a little.
"I don't blame you at all." She nodded to the nearest drone. "Preservation Insider is pretty notorious for hounding their subjects. I had to file a report about them with Station Security shortly after returning from the survey, and I know that Pin-Lee has threatened them with suits a couple of times. The restraining orders are still pending, unfortunately."
I fired off a quick message to Pin-Lee, telling her I wanted to be added to the restraining order list. (Or however that worked. I assumed it was just a long list that said 'Stay Away From These People Or Get Sued.') As I did, I accidentally said, "I don't like how they look."
Bharadwaj did this thing sometimes, if I said something weird, where she sort of went still and flattened out her expression to something not unlike construct neutral. In an even tone, she asked, "What do you mean by that?"
I suddenly wanted to wiggle in my seat on her comfortable office couch. My eyes were already fixed on a spot on the wall opposite me, a small framed screen that cycled through still images of Bharadwaj and various other humans looking happy together, but now I deprioritized the drones that were in the office with us. I checked on my other humans instead, but none of them were doing anything particularly interesting; Mensah was in a meeting with another council member, Gurathin was acquiring a hot drink from a bot merchant in one of the public food areas, both Ratthi and Pin-Lee were still asleep in their respective quarters, (Or they at least hadn't exited their bedrooms yet. I wasn't 100% positive, because I didn't send my drones into any of my humans' bedrooms. I didn't want to watch them sleep, or do any of the other things humans do in there.) and Arada and Overse were out of drone range, on a visit to the planet to see family. (They had both sent me short messages at the end of the previous planetary day cycle, which basically amounted to "things are nice here and we aren't dead," which I appreciated.)
Bharadwaj waited in patient silence for me to answer, even though I was taking way longer than I actually needed so I could try and put together a response. After an embarrassingly extended 51 seconds, I managed, "You could tell just by looking at them that they belonged to a company."
Technically, according to Preservation legal language, they belonged to a "news organization," but as far as I was concerned the difference was mostly semantic. Bharadwaj didn't bother to correct me. "Because of the logos, you mean. The identifiers bother you?" I shrugged, because that was easier than saying yes. After waiting a few seconds to see if I wanted to say more, she continued, "I've noticed that you're averse to clothing with images on it, as well. Is that related?"
I shrugged again, but this time I found more words to say. "All my existence, I've worn logos. My armor was always stamped with the company logo, and the logo of the company that was renting me. And I have company logos on my inorganics, too." Bharadwaj nodded. She'd seen me in pieces that one time on our survey, so she'd probably seen some of the symbols that were machined into the inorganic parts of my arms and legs. "I can't do anything to remove them."
Bharadwaj was still wearing her neutral, listening expression, but it broke slightly with a frown. "Why not?"
I touched one arm with the opposite hand. I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but I could feel the seam of my gunport through the soft fabric. And, in the corner of that piece of me, a little etched spot. It was too small for me to make out the detail of it with just my fingertips, but it was too familiar for me to forget. There were more like it all over me, including on all of my important internal bits. There were a lot of reasons that it would be too impractical to try and get rid of them, not least of which was that I didn't have a cubicle anymore to manufacture and attach replacement pieces. I didn't think there were any MedSystems in existence that could be calibrated to print me replacement organs, either. (Well, maybe ART's could have, but I hadn't thought to ask when we were arguing about how much of me it was going to cut out. Replacing my lungs, cardiac pump, etc. hadn't really been a priority at that time.) The company didn’t own me anymore, but they owned all of the patents on any opportunity I might have had to strip myself of their name.
That was too much introspection. "I'd have to scratch them off the casing," I said. My voice came out sounding odd, which I hated because I knew she’d be able to tell. "That would damage them, and maybe affect the way they fly. They're not really aerodynamic as it is."
Bharadwaj paused for barely two seconds, mentally backtracking. "Of course. And that would be a poor way to treat them, after you... liberated them from their previous owner."
I said nothing. She waited a bit, then said, apparently apropos of nothing, "Well, if you're interested, I have some acrylics."
I didn't know that "acrylics" was another word for paint. Bharadwaj had had to go to her apartment to get them. It wasn't far, but I'd walked with her. She could tell without me saying anything that I didn't feel like talking anymore, and she didn't do that thing that a lot of humans do, trying to fill the awkward silence with even more awkward one-sided rambling. That made the silence kind of comfortable, instead.
When we arrived she'd gone to look for the paint in a small storage room while I sat on a chair in her sitting area, examining the somewhat cluttered decor. (I'd obviously seen it plenty of times through my drones, but that was different than looking with my eyes.) Her home was like her office, shelves and surfaces overcrowded with human stuff, but nothing dusty or stained. The dirty sock smell that was ubiquitous to human dwellings was present, but it was masked by something warm, a sort of sweet, sharp smell that I thought might be food related. It wasn't unpleasant.
It took her a couple minutes to return, holding a large box that was made of some sort of solid woven material. I stood up to take it from her.
"This is my general DIY bin," she'd told me as she handed it over. "It's a bit of a mix in here. Feel free to take anything you want to use. Would you like any help?"
I'd signaled negative through the feed and taken the whole box, which she’d seemed confused about but didn’t resist. Now I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the hotel, finishing up with the last drone. The container of black paint had been nearly full when I'd opened it, but now it was more than half empty. The other two drones were already up in formation with the rest of my squad, blending as best they could with their newly matte black casing.
I set the paintbrush on the side table beside the open paint container and woke the drone in my hand. It came online with a bright musical tone, as its partners had. I'd tried to find a way to disable that, but it was buried pretty deep in the foundational code for some reason, and yanking it out would break a lot of other functions. I'd just have to settle for knowing that this set of drones wasn't cut out for stealth operations.
I had the drone spin in a tight circle in front of me, so I could scrutinize it from every angle. The logo was no longer visible, but I'd saved the image to permanent memory. It was simplistic, just the initials of the news company in a bold font. It was the sort of thing that a corporation in the Corporation Rim used if it was either too small to afford something more distinctive, or too big to be mistaken for anyone else. Both types tended to stamp those initials on everything they could force to hold still for half a second, and all that could be done about that was to accept it, or cover it up and pretend it wasn’t there.
My lungs were suddenly filled with something adjacent to that old I don't care that used to be so familiar. It had been blocked while I focused on my task, but now that I was done, I couldn't not see how pointless this exercise had been. Even with the logos covered, the news drones couldn't be anything but news drones. A human might not be able to pin their true purpose on sight anymore, but it would still be obvious to even the casual observer that there was something off about them compared to the rest of my set. And the news company still probably legally owned them, if anyone there was brave and/or stupid enough to come and try to take them back from me.
I decided I didn't want to use my eyes anymore, so I watched through the drone's camera as I pushed my sleeve up to expose my gunport. Mensah had bought me the best non-weaponized drones in the catalog, (which I had noticed but not known how to thank her for,) but in terms of production value, they had nothing on the news drone. It was made to get up close to humans and augmented humans and whatever it was that they made news programs about, and to record or stream those things for other humans and augmented humans to watch for entertainment or education. The picture was sharp, and the drone must have been coded to independently follow interesting focus points, (Probably because humans and augmented humans are terrible at operating drones while doing other things, like talking or thinking.) because it autonomously zeroed and zoomed in on my thumb where it was brushing over the company's logo. Seeing the scoured and sanded inorganic part up close in high definition, it looked kind of like an artistic shot from my media. That might have made it more distant, and let me shove the unwelcome emotion(s) I was feeling away, except that I could also feel the deep divot of the company's initials nip at the pad of my thumb on each pass.
I'd gotten caught in a loop, and I knew it. I couldn't quite make my hand stop, though, so I pushed the drone to focus on something else. I was the only moving object in the room, so it just turned 180 degrees and settled on what it found there. I did, too. Bharadwaj's woven box was still open where I'd set it on the floor nearby, and the drone zoomed and panned over the contents. There were a lot more paints in different colors, but also things like bound up lengths of thick fibers, and scraps of patterned fabric, and a few sealed packets of something solid, also in various colors. There were even some things that I actually recognized on sight as being for practical purposes, like several different types of adhesive. (I hadn’t bothered asking earlier what “DIY” actually meant, and the box full of functional junk made me a little curious. Like, maybe 23% curious. Not quite enough to look it up.)
I managed to pry my hand off my gunport to stick it in the box instead. (I guess at some point I’d slid off the bed onto the floor, but I wasn’t sure when.) I shut down all higher thought and focused on all of the different textures, the soft fibers and the solid containers. Bharadwaj made things with these other things. I’d seen some of them before—some small paintings hung on the wall of her apartment, a colorful container for flora cuttings on her office desk, a sweater Pin-Lee sometimes wore on her days off. Those things had been these things first, before she had made them into new things.
My fingers closed around a little cylinder and I pulled it out, turned it over a few times in my hand. The object inside was also cylindrical, but smaller, so it rattled as the container moved. The label proclaimed it to be something called ‘epoxy putty,’ and according to the long list of things it purportedly did, it was more on the practical end of the fun/practical junk spectrum. (It finally occurred to me that Bharadwaj had probably not been offering to let me take the entire box. I had no use for anything but the paint, and she might actually need one of these things if something broke in her apartment.) Apparently this sort of thing was used to patch damaged metals and plastics. I wondered what it was worth, in the Corporation Rim. A tech or engineer probably traded multiple meals to get a small amount like this, and Bharadwaj had some sitting in her everything-box as a just-in-case contingency if she ever encountered some metal that needed patching.
I checked the label more thoroughly. For being such a specialized product, it didn’t take a specialist to use it. You just sort of pinched off however much you needed, messed with it to make chemistry things happen (the label was vague about the details), and then pressed it into the broken spot to fill in the cracks. It dried in about an hour, and then it could be sanded down or painted or whatever it took to make the patched spot look uniform. Like it had never been damaged in the first place.
It was a dumb idea. Patching something didn’t actually undo the damage, it just covered it up. There wasn’t anything that could be done to make it so the damage had never existed. Even replacing a compromised part would alter the whole in a way, leaving it mismatched, the new piece held up against the older set as a telltale echo of what it had replaced.
I’d been allowing my drones to idle. The intel ones were designed for that sort of thing, remaining stationary or on patrol paths without much guidance for extended periods of time, but the news drones weren’t supposed to be completely ignored. They fell into a default program, the two dropping out of formation to join the one, and took up positions in tandem. The three-camera spread they showed me wasn’t suited to surveillance, but (if I could get over how weird it always was to see myself in my cameras,) it looked a lot like a scene from a serial. Like maybe the one in Sanctuary Moon when the colony solicitor went back to her quarters after attending the funeral for the colony solicitor’s bodyguard and had a prolonged solo scene where she felt a lot of emotions very intensely. The drones had even picked up some sort of cue somewhere—definitely not from me—and responded to it by altering their filters, rendering me in cool, somber tones. From a purely artistic standpoint, it looked pretty damn good. Definitely better than any of the crap that the augmented human journalist I’d taken them from had ever used them for.
I gave the drones my attention, and started poking at their features. They came with a whole suite of options for editing what they were recording in real time, and everything I did with them looked media-worthy. Intel drones they were not, but using them for gossip news was a waste of their potential, as well. They deserved better than that.
Something cracked in my hand, and I focused the nearest camera on it. I was still holding the plastic cylinder of epoxy putty, and it had broken. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d clenched my fist around it. Hopefully compromising the container didn’t ruin the product. Although, it was an adhesive. Maybe the product could fix the container? I realized 0.7 seconds after having that thought that there were other adhesives in Bharadwaj’s everything-box that might be better suited to this particular task, but by the time that thought occurred I’d already taken the lid off the putty and dumped it out onto the palm of my hand. It was a log, gray on the outside and white on the inside, with one end cut at a slight angle where Bharadwaj had taken the last piece she’d needed for whatever she’d needed it for.
One drone focused on my hand as I messed with the log, another on my face (I ignored that one), and the third on extreme closeups of interesting but stationary things, which I saw now was actually a setting in the suite. It panned up my arm, filtered to dampen color, and settled on my gunport logo.
Fuck. Well… fuck. I checked the drones’ software to make sure there wasn’t some sort of sub-sentient bot running them, giving them personality. There wasn’t. It had just been focusing on something that its programming rated as likely to be visually interesting. I didn’t like being visually interesting. I preferred being boring enough for humans to ignore.
I ordered the drones back into formation, and pinched off a bit of the putty.
“You weren’t kidding about the production quality. It’s almost too nice. It might be better to lower the frame rate slightly, so it doesn’t look uncanny.”
Bharadwaj was doing her best to control one of my specialized media drones, exploring the various editing options one at a time. (Actually, I was controlling it. I could see almost immediately when I’d offered it to her that trying to direct it was pushing her toward a headache, and had added myself to the command loop, acting as a relay between her and it. It was a pain to follow the sluggish pace of a human, but she was always patient with me.) I’d offered to use it, and its two partners, to record interviews and B-roll for her documentary.
She raised her eyebrows as she (I) gave the drone a command to position itself in the center of the ceiling and look down on the room. “I really need to reorganize in here, don’t I?”
“Not really.” The other two drones, allowed to idle, were following their default settings. One was focused on Bharadwaj’s face, her slightly inward smile as she played with the program. The other was panning slowly over the various homemade objects on her desk, applying a warm filter that made the images feel as cozy in the video as they did in person. “It’s visually interesting.”
She made a sound kind of like a short laugh, which was usually part of her response when I said something sarcastic that wasn’t also depressing. “Thank you, I think.”
I could feel my own face making an expression that might have been a few steps down from a smile. (I couldn’t see it, though; I’d found a setting in the media drones’ program that allowed me to designate myself as the camera operator, so I was now the lowest-priority object in their vicinity unless I directed them otherwise.) Bharadwaj was saying something about needing to re-shoot a couple of things she’d already filmed, and I agreed to help with that in exchange for a hard currency card. As we discussed more of her plans for the visual aspects of the project, I rested my hand on my forearm, feeling through the fabric of my sleeve. The gunport beneath felt smooth.