Chapter Text
I was lying face down on a repair platform, bolted down with straps to force me to stay in place while two company techs worked on installing something in my energy weapons. (My maintenance report was written out in the feed, but it wasn’t like I was getting out of this, so I only glanced at the document instead of reading it all the way through. I was being fitted with some kind of device that would allow the company to lock and/or fire my weapons remotely.)
I was trying to ignore the feeling of tools digging into the inorganic seams of my forearms, and was focusing instead on convincing HubSys to let me download the next episode of some show I’d started called Sanctuary Moon, when a woman poked her head into the room. “Is that unit…” she read my serial number off a clipboard.
One of the techs took the back of my head in one hand, and turned me sideways so that he could read the numbers etched into the inorganic parts on the side of my neck. He held my head in place (at an angle that would have been painful for a human) while he traced his finger along the number. “Yep,” he said, and let me go. I tried to be subtle when I turned my neck back to a more comfortable angle, so he wouldn’t notice.
“It’s needed for a contract,” the woman said, flipping a page on the clipboard. She handed it to the other tech, who took it and read it. “Complete this install by the end of the work period so we can send the unit out.”
“What?!?” The one holding the clipboard sounded angry. “We’ve already been here a full cycle—“
“Does this mean the supervisor’s approving overtime?” The one who’d grabbed my head asked.
“If you finished your work in a reasonable time frame, you wouldn’t need overtime,” the woman glared at him.
I accessed HubSys again to see what the new install was going to be. I’d been through a truly ridiculous number of “repairs” and “upgrades” since I’d hacked my governor module about 2,500 hours ago, but I guess killing 57 of your clients means even the company can’t pretend you’re in good working order, and needs to make sure you’re not going to do it again. They’d wiped my memory after I committed mass murder, so I wasn’t actually sure of much of anything from before that, but I was pretty sure I’d gone a long time before without undergoing any major refurbishment. Now I’d spent the better part of the last several cycles being poked at and messed with by humans. Yeah, it wasn’t pleasant, but nobody ever asks murderbots what they think. We’re not supposed to be capable of much thinking in the first place.
The new install was a listening device meant to be inserted into my rib compartment with a (so far as I could tell) fancy improved feed relay. Usually, the company has to wait for a contract to end so they can access the data they make SecUnits record nonstop, but supposedly, the new relay was going to establish a link to let the company listen in while I was still on contract. Great. It sounded like the sort of thing that meant people would be paying close attention to me and what I recorded. That didn’t bode well for me maintaining the illusion that I was a perfectly normal gov-modded SecUnit, and I kind of needed that illusion, you know, to remain alive. As uncomfortable as it was to get new parts installed, I was pretty sure that it would be worse to get dissected alive before being stuffed into a recycler.
The woman left the room, and when the door closed behind her, the techs started talking to each other. I was supposed to be recording what they said in case they were talking about unionizing or something, but I set my audio inputs to filter for keywords and tried to go back to my HubSys downloads. If I was going out on a contract, I actually wanted more than one episode of Sanctuary Moon in my personal onboard storage. It was a lot harder to hack HubSys on contracts when I had to be focusing on pretending to do my job, so my best chance at having anything resembling entertainment was to scrape whatever I could out of the feed now, while I was still in the deployment center.
My audio input pinged me with one of my key words, and I tuned back in to hear the tech closer to my head say, “Help me with the restraints, we need to flip it over.”
Sometimes I thought about permanently shutting myself down. Maybe I could get myself squished under a hauler bot or something, or out myself as a rogue and shoot myself in the face, anything so I wouldn’t have to keep putting up with contract after contract and repair after repair, and cramming my broken body into cubicles over and over again, because honestly, it sucked. A lot. But I kept myself still as the techs undid the buckles and brushed their hands over my skin, and I told myself that if I died now, I’d never finish Sanctuary Moon, and there were still like seven more seasons of that I hadn’t consumed yet. (I wasn’t sure what I’d do after I finished Sanctuary Moon, but murderbots don’t really need long term plans, for obvious reasons.)
The techs took the straps off me in sections, and there were a lot of straps, because nobody wants the SecUnit who’s insides they’re working on to accidentally flinch so hard it throws them across the room. The last restraints came off from around my ankles, and the techs stepped back.
“On your back,” the first one said to me, tapping my shoulder, and like a good SecUnit, I complied. My arms had been stretched over my head to make them easier to work on, and it hurt when I pulled them back towards me to prop myself up. The internal mechanisms hadn’t quite been realigned to their right places yet, and when I instinctively tried to close my pried-open gunports, that hurt too, and they didn’t even close properly. I painfully managed to flip myself over, so I was lying on my back looking up at the harsh light of the gross ceiling.
The second tech immediately pulled my arms straight to my sides so my gunports would still be exposed to work on. The first tech just started strapping me down again, starting with my ankles, and working his way up my thighs and the rest of my body. Now that I was face-up, I actually had to work on controlling my expressions when he got close enough to bolt the strap over my forehead into place. “There we go,” he said, slapping my chest once everything was locked down so I could no longer effectively do anything about that (not that I could have before). It was my experience that company techs were always very invested in making sure their SecUnits were properly secured with physical restraints that we can’t hack. Almost like techs don’t trust that governor modules work. Ha ha. And to be fair to the restraints, if I decided right then to start being a proper rogue and murder both my techs, I wouldn’t have been able to do it strapped down like that.
The first tech dragged a tray of tools closer to the repair platform, and sat down on a little rolling stool he positioned next to where my chest was. The second tech was working on my left gunport on the other side of me, using the equipment that had already been out from before.
“Sure, I’ll just finish the weapon locks myself, no problem,” the second tech grumbled.
“You’re not certified for chest cavity repair,” the first one shrugged, and cracked his knuckles. “And the last thing we need is for PUOMANT to sue the company for giving them faulty equipment.”
“Shouldn’t we…turn off some of its functions before you open it up?” The second one asked, giving me a weird glance. I stared at the ceiling and tried to look like a normal SecUnit.
“Like higher processing? No, you don’t need to for this,” the first tech shook his head, and picked up a tool that looked like a bunch of little spikes on the end of a stick. “And it takes forever to turn them back on after.”
Right. Like I care that I have to be awake for this. (For the record, I do care. I would much rather have been offline before I got my chest cavity opened by a human.) A cubicle will put you offline, but it can’t do specialized installs, therefore, construct technicians still had jobs.
The first tech held the spiky tool between two fingers and started using a scalpel to cut my sticky skinsuit open, peeling it away from my neck and shoulders. I hate being sticky. (Several hours of maintenance on your internal parts without a break tends to make for a lot of gross, bad, organic smells.)
The tech rolled the plasticky suit down my body, exposing my chest. “Careful,” the other tech said, not looking up from my arm. “I still need access to the elbow joint.”
“Yeah, I know,” the first tech said, handing him the scalpel. The second tech started sawing at the folds of skinsuit around my elbow, while the first one picked up the spiky tool and started rolling it over the organic parts of my skin. I could feel whatever kept the flaps of my skin secured in place (ew) detaching as the tool went, like there were bubbles forming under my skin. When the tech felt that I’d been sufficiently rolled with spikes, he set the tool aside and started peeling up my skin. I could feel his nails digging into the edges of my organic parts. Neither of the techs were wearing gloves. I knew company regulations required gloves, but technically, SecUnits didn’t contain anything that would burn and/or corrode human skin (if you remembered to wash your hands after coming into contact with our fluids), so I’d only ever seen one tech that actually worked in gloves. And he’d been super clumsy and grossed out by me the whole time, so that was unpleasant for its own reasons.
The tech picked delicately at my skin, peeling it up and away from the inorganic structure beneath. I had a copy of my own specs (that was what I’d used to hack my governor module) and I knew that theoretically the compartment under my rib cage could be opened without massive fluid loss as a result. I guess I was going to find out. The tech took a series of dissecting pins from the tray, and used them to keep my skin stretched open, leaving my internal mechanisms exposed. (Yeah, it felt about as comfortable as it sounds.)
While he was doing that, the other tech had finished cutting away the skin suit and was pulling on my left energy weapon with two hands. When I’d sat up, I’d misaligned the way the weapon sat in my arm, and apparently that was a problem. He yanked on the weapon, and I could feel that all the way through my arm up to my shoulder joint. Ouch. He fiddled with it, and it felt stuck in place, even to me, so it hurt a lot as it pulled on the other parts inside my arm that it was attached to. “Ugh,” he groaned. “This fucking cheap piece of…” he mumbled to himself as he tried to manually shove my weapon back into the gunport. I already tried that, idiot, it won’t close. And I know I’m a cheap piece of company tech, but still. You don’t have to be rude.
“Almost got it,” he grunted, and he twisted something sideways that I’m pretty sure wasn’t supposed to move. I bit down on the inside of my cheek to try and keep myself from reacting with a noise SecUnits aren’t supposed to make. I could feel the metal pieces scraping against each other as he twisted my energy weapon perpendicular to my arm, and then he pulled up, released, and it snapped into the right place and my forearm closed up around it. Which would have felt like a relief if not for 1) the fact that that hurt like a crowbar inside my arm trying to pry out my tendons, and 2) he then ran his fingers along the bottom of my arm, tickling and poking it in the right spot and then squeezing my wrist to manually open the port again for maintenance. At least the energy weapon moved smoothly along the track this time, but I still had to focus to hold back the groaning sound my organics wanted me to make.
The first tech finished pinning all my skin out of the way. He had a different tool now, one that looked like a wrench, and he started loosening the metal bolts on my sternum, lined up down the front of my rib cage to access the compartment. He fastened the wrench to the first bolt, tightened it until I could almost feel the mechanical stress internal alert (even though those had been disabled for this install cycle), and then started twisting the first bolt off. It felt weird. It alternated between painful pressure over my sternum with a sudden gut-wrenching light feeling that just didn’t feel right as the bolt detached. The tech placed it off to the side, and it made a clinking sound as it went into a metal bowl. Then he started on the next.
The second tech fitted a little orange thing around the front of my left energy weapon. It looked like a cap. He held it in place with one hand, and poked a bunch of buttons hidden along the inside of the weapon to practice opening, closing, and changing the power level of it with the cap in place. “Unit, confirm weapon is set to demo mode,” he said, not looking at my face.
“Confirmed,” I said out loud, hoping it came out normally what with how weird and empty my chest was starting to feel.
The second tech pointed my weapon at a small red pad held between two fingers, holding the orange cap in place with his other hand. “Fire,” he said. I fired. The demo shot was just a small burst of electricity, enough that a human would feel like they were being lightly tased. It hit the pad and dissolved into nothing.
“Ouch,” the tech winced and dropped my arm, sucking on his fingers.
“What happened?” The one unbolting my chest cavity asked.
“Static shock,” he winced. “Where do we keep the—“
“In that drawer,” the first one gestured with his head. The second one got up, then returned a few moments later wearing a thick glove that was supposed to protect him from accidental demo mode shocks. He grabbed my gun again, with a much tighter grip now that the glove was muffling his sensation, and had me fire again. Then he touched things on an external feed data surface for a while while he held the cap in place, calibrating it to my systems or something.
The first tech had finished with the bolts, and used a little metal tool inserted between the seams of my ribs to pry open my rib compartment. It hurt. I felt too light and open, like there was something missing. I felt like something heavy had been sitting on my chest, and then it suddenly got up and I couldn’t remember how to breathe properly anymore. The tech got the door of the compartment propped open, and I knew I didn’t have any squishy gross organic parts in there to feel cold, but I felt cold anyway. I didn’t like having my internal structures open and exposed like this. I liked keeping all my parts where they belonged. The tech frowned down at me.
“Did Lena drop off the part, or—“
“Check the fabricator,” the second one said. The first tech got up, leaving me nothing to focus on but the feeling of the pins digging into my skin and the discomfort of gloved human hands on my energy weapon. And that second thing suddenly got much worse as I felt the cap dig into the firing chamber of my weapon, like pins and needles in a part of me I didn’t know could feel that.
“There!” The second tech said. “I think that’s good.” He had me open and close my port a few times, making sure the cap stayed on through the process. It felt weird and bad to close the cap under my skin. New installs always felt bad at first, but this felt like a prickle under my skin that didn’t even go away while my gunport was closed.
The tech raised my arm at the demo pad and made me fire three times. Then he tapped a bunch of things on the data surface, and told me to fire. So I tried. I felt the feedback as my system loaded the energy, and then with nowhere to go, the electricity dispersed into the surface of my skin, frying me with about maybe a tenth of a governor module’s capabilities. I twitched involuntarily as the shock raced over my muscles. The tech either didn’t notice, or it didn’t matter to him.
He made me try to fire two more times, keeping the lock in place. It hurt worse each time. I didn’t want to know what it would feel like if the lock was online while I had my weapons at full capacity.
Then, the really weird thing happened. “Hold,” he said. I held—I didn’t want to fire again with the lock still on. But he tapped the surface again, and I felt my body draining energy from my other processes, forcing it into my weapon, and firing it without my permission. It felt like I suddenly desperately needed a recharge cycle, I couldn’t keep my processes together. I think I shorted out.
I came online again to a device pressed into the data override port in the back of my neck, forcing me awake again. I felt dizzy, like I’d lost a lot of fluids, but according to diagnostics my levels were fine.
“What did you do to it?” The first tech asked.
“Forgot to turn the lock off,” the second one called over his shoulder, going back to my arm and leaving the thing stuck in my override port. It felt like how I imagined a rusty nail stuck in a rotting piece of wood would feel, if I was the wood. “Overloaded the system for a second. Should be fixed now.”
“If you fry it before it goes on contract, I’m blaming you,” the first one said.
“It was an accident,” the second tech grumbled. He fiddled with the data surface again, setting up another shot.
I wondered if the cap thing was new. I hadn’t had them when I’d murdered 57 of my clients, I was pretty sure. It seemed like that was the kind of thing specifically designed to stop a rogue SecUnit from murdering a lot of humans. Which made sense, and was probably a smart idea to install. Nobody ever asks if these things hurt the sentient weapons they’re being installed on, but protecting the feelings of murderbots isn’t really a company priority. Protecting the lives of well-paying clients is.
The tech forced me to fire a few shots using commands on his feed surface, and the cap drew energy from other parts of my body to do it even though the hold command I maintained was supposed to stop it from firing. It wasn’t that bad. It just felt a lot like getting my internal organs pulled out of me through a hole the size of a straw. When he was done, he had me fold the weapon back into my arm, and patted me gently. “One down,” he said. “Just one more.” He looked at the other tech. “Maybe we will finish up before the rest period.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the first tech grumbled. He was back from the fabricator with some kind of metal spherical thing, with a couple of plates visible on the surface and a tiny hole in the side of it. He lowered it into my open chest cavity, and then the too-light feeling was gone, replaced with a sudden too-heavy feeling that I think I liked even less. He reached up past the listening device, up through my chest towards my clavicle, and used a little tool with a hook to pry a few of my wires loose, which, ow. He inserted one of my wires into the hole on the device, and hooked it into place.
Now that I was connected to it, I could tell it was just a fancy listening device with a feed relay for long distance transmissions to the company. Great. (That was sarcasm.) Actually, maybe it would be okay. I wondered if I could hack it to give me long distance access to the company’s entertainment satellites while I was on contracts on planet surfaces. I hate planets for a lot of reasons, and one of the reasons at the top of the list is no media.
The first tech pushed all the extra loose wires back up into me with a thumb, pressing painfully against them. “That’ll be fine,” he murmured. He got a flashlight and leaned his head on my stomach area, looking up into the compartment. “No, it won’t,” he sighed, and he sat back up and started prepping the soldering iron. I fucking hate the soldering iron.
The techs switched places around me, so the second one could have access to my other gunport, where he immediately started prodding and messing with it. The first tech warmed up the solder, and then stuck it into my rib compartment, and that was the closest I came to screaming during the entire process so far. It was hot and melting and fizzing against the inside of me, and I bit all the way through my cheek trying not to react. I tasted my blood dribbling uncomfortably down the back of my throat as the tech pressed the heat inescapably against my wires until everything was set in place.
I took shallow, ragged breaths, trying not to move or react too much. You’d think by now I’d be fucking used to repairs and installs, but unfortunately not, it hurts every time. The now-familiar aching pull of the second tech’s hands slotting my right energy weapon back onto its track was almost pleasant by comparison.
The first tech took the opportunity for a short break as my internal parts cooled. He stepped off to the side and pulled a caffeine patch out of a pocket, applying it to his inner arm. He watched me while he did this, and I stared at the ceiling and thought about what a relief it was going to be to climb into a cubicle after this and watch Sanctuary Moon in peace.
When he came back, he sat next to me, put on some latex gloves, and mixed two cups of clear liquid into a gooey paste.
“Is that resin body safe?” The second tech asked, waving his hand over his nose. “It smells awful.”
“It’s okay for use on SecUnits,” the first tech said, which was a great answer. Fuck. He poured it into my rib compartment and the too-heavy feeling got worse, oozing over my internal parts and settling in heavily like cement, like a bunch of chewed food a human had forced onto me, like I don’t know what but it was sticky and heavy and horrible. I felt like I could feel it dripping through the bottom of the rib compartment onto my other internal parts, maybe even sticking to my lung. The tech closed the compartment over the resin, squeezing it, and I felt my performance reliability dip low enough to knock me unconscious for just a moment before the module in my override port forced me online again. No respite for murderbots.
“Shouldn’t you wait for it to set first?” The second tech asked.
“Can you just focus on your own job?” The first one glared. “I have to close it up before it sets, so the compartment seals shut.”
So my rib compartment was going to be stuck like this, then. It felt heavy and thick in my chest. I would almost rather be shot repeatedly or have my limbs torn off, because at least that pain was sharp and a cubicle would make it go away. This was just stuck, heavy and uncomfortable and clogging my sensory inputs with feedback, and I knew the cubicle wasn’t going to touch it. Once the resin set, probably nothing would. Just great for me.
I hate everything.
The tech bolted my sternum back into place, each tightening bolt making the pressure in my ribs feel worse. I couldn’t get used to it. And to top it all off, the second tech tested the other cap, which dug its spiky little feet into my weapon and distributed the demo mode energy over my skin with another painful pulse.
I was barely conscious by the time the tech started unpinning my skin and pressing it back into place with magnets, but the override module wasn’t letting me shut down properly, so I was stuck weaving in and out of painful awareness in what felt like a never-ending nightmare of misery. If that sounds dramatic, I don’t. Fucking. Care. It was awful.
Once they were both done, I just kind of laid there on the table for a while, still strapped down. Their shifts ended, so they left me there and then left the room altogether. I tried to lower my pain sensors, but I was so stiff and sensitive from the install that it didn’t really work. I just laid there, looking up at the gross ceiling, absolutely miserable for a while, waiting for the next shift to come in and unstrap me so I could get in a cubicle and try to forget this had happened.