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I received the distress call from Preservation Academic Survey Mission Shuttle g-078 four hours after it was sent. That’s not a terribly long time. I had chosen my current mission to be not far from where the PreservationAux team was operating on purpose. I liked not being too far from SecUnit when it was in my general vicinity, although up until now I had never received a distress call from it. Or its humans, that was. Checking the connection I had to the communication device, I found that SecUnit itself had not tried to send a call. Had its humans done something stupid?
I acknowledged the call immediately, and began rewriting my course. My own mission was tense but not as urgent. I was following a trail coming from a subcorporate, a surprising amount of human noise in feeds and digital spaces where no humans were declared to be traveling. Trafficking, most likely, or a refugee route. I expected the first and hoped for the latter, but the more research I did the more likely it became that I was going to have to take down and then fix up a bunch of reports for something horrible.
One Mihiran standard cycle later, I came within range of the Preservation shuttle. The way there had been emotionally difficult for me; ever since I started watching serials with SecUnit, I’ve come to yearn for fantastical methods of transport that might render me useless in the long term but would, in the short term, mean I could know what was happening much faster. I pinged SecUnit the moment I knew my communication device would relay. The silence I received deafened me.
The shuttle was drifting just on the corner of a planet, close enough for me todock through one of my own shuttles, and evidence that the team had fled the planet before emergency responders could have picked them up.
I sent several loud and demanding requests for everything that had happened and all processes currently running along with the clearance permission for the Preservation team to dock and board.
I chewed through every bit of data they gave me in a manner of milliseconds, hungry to know what was wrong, and more importantly, what had happened to SecUnit to render it uncommunicative. Beside “SecUnit in critical condition,” I didn’t get much information. I couldn’t wait for the humans to initiate docking. They hadn’t even managed to strike up a proper conversation with me, still too far out, (and according to the files, all too injured themselves), so I took matters into my own hands. I sent one of my shuttles down to meet them, stocked with emergency fuel and connectives to my tractor system so I could pull them in faster, and multiple medical drones of various sizes. I overrode their shuttle’s basic bot and took over. My presence filled the tiny ship, searching every inch of it for the input and information I wanted, and as I extended my code into the crevices I took over the comm.
Do not panic, this is the Perihelion speaking. I ’m here to rescue you. Where is SecUnit?
“Stars you were fast. Our own responder will take a few more cycles,” Dr. Ayda Mensah said to me in perplexed confusion. “I mean, thank you, Perihelion. We really need your help.”
You will experience short turbulences as my shuttle docks yours. I ’ve brought emergency supplies. After a rudimentary check I recommend you board my ship. Where is SecUnit?
Dr. Mensah wrapped a hand around the opposite elbow. “Unresponsive in medical. That’s mostly why we called you. The rest of us are,” (a hesitation I knew how to interpret thanks to SecUnit) “alright.”
I pushed through the medical system and found SecUnit, indeed, unresponsive in medical. Every other priority ticked down into backsystems. I shoved most of my attention towards it, trying to understand why it was offline, apparently physically unharmed as it was, but still tied down and secured heavily. The onslaught of questions I aimed at Dr. Mensah caused her feed interface to short-circuit. I hadn’t done that to a human since Iris got augmented. Mensah clasped her ear in pain and pulled the interface out.
I forced their shuttle open under my airlock and sent in my drones. With my movable drones and the insight I had into the ship’s systems now, I’d be able to scan and assess the situation much faster. What I saw already unnerved me. Mensah did not look ‘alright’, and neither did the rest of her crew gathered in the cockpit behind her.
All of you are injured to various degrees and I detect traces of poison or similar contaminants in most of you. Particularly SecUnit is in an awful state. You will board the Perihelion for further treatment.
Her shoulders lost tension. “Yes, of course. Please.”
Pin-Lee said to Dr. Gurathin, “I really, really hope this works.” Her voice indicated recent misuse. Dr. Gurathin ducked away from her immediately and out of the room, and was the first to follow my medical drones’ guidance into my own shuttle. He seemed less injured than others of the the group beside various small to mid-size bruises along his arms and left shoulder, clearly indicative of a physical fight.
Out of habit I tried to flood SecUnit’s feed so I could access its logs, something that would have been possible with it offline, albeit a transgression it would only forgive if done for the good of its clients, which I could argue for in this case, and would have. If there had been a feed to access. Something was blocking me, not in the metaphysical way a code or firewall would. This felt different. Its presence was there, odd and ethereal as always, if subdued by the shutdown. But there was a mess of fuzz and fire surrounding it, and penetrating its walls almost caused me a physical sense of pain, nausea perhaps, something that would have impacted my systems if my only point of access wasn’t a subsection of my larger self. The breeching attempt caused SecUnit to stir, a reaction from its organics that made it seize and twitch and cry out despite the layers of fabric and gauze covering its mouth and keeping its jaw shut.
I reeled back hard enough to lose control over navigation for a minimal moment.
What happened to you? I crackled through the shuttle. Heads were ducked. Dr. Gurathin fled into my shuttle and all too happily backed into the farthest corner of it, away from the airlock.
“We suffered an attack by what we assume to be raiders.” That information had not been in the files Dr. Mensah had sent, and immediately I felt a pang of irregular emotion that this small vessel could not hold or bear to identify. Dr. Mensah’s voice was slow and low, and well measured, as if rehearsed. “We’ll tell you everything you need to know, but please let us board first. We’re worried for SecUnit.”
Of course, Dr. Mensah.
“Are you—, will you want help with getting SecUnit off board?” Dr. Ratthi gestured at my medical drones just as the seal to the tiny medical area slid open. He tried to step between it and the door. My drone beeped in outrage.
Feel free to assist, I told him, and navigated the drone past him. It only went up to his knees, so it made sense for him to doubt my ability to carry a body. Any other moment I’d have felt satisfaction at his surprised “oh” when the drone unfolded into a gurney, and from underneath lifter arms rose.
Dr. Ratthi displayed equal bruises to Dr. Gurathin, but was much dirtier than him. In fact, it seemed as if Gurathin had cleaned himself only recently. Now that I looked for it, I registered the irritated flush of his skin anywhere it was exposed, and traces of disinfectant that contributed to the irritation. But as my medical drone faced Ratthi long enough to allow a scan, it registered more than superficial bruises.
Correction, do not assist. You have two fractured ribs. Please board my shuttle and wait for further instructions.
He stepped into the room, despite my orders, and flailed. “No, no, I’m good, I’ll help!”
My drone interfaced with the rudimentary medical bed, unlinked it from its cradle and slowly pulled it onto the gurney, with SecUnit on top barely jostled at all.
“Oh,” Dr. Ratthi repeated, wheezing just a little at the end of the sound.
If you want to assist, then follow my drone and answer my questions. What happened to SecUnit?
He did, in fact, follow the drone. His eyes were fixed on SecUnit’s foot, which was no longer in its usual steady boots, but somehow, obscenely naked. The metal toes were splayed but twitchy.
“Many things,” the human said in a tone of voice that implied too much. “The raiders used a sort of gas on us, through the vents. It got to all of us, and at first we thought SecUnit wasn’t affected. We were wrong, though, it was affected even worse than us, it just took longer to settle in.”
And why does a poison warrant restricting, blinding, and deafening it?
Dr. Ratthi almost stumbled. “It’s a long story. The short version is that the poison, or intoxicant, it, uh… it was a mind-and-behavior altering substance. SecUnit… can’t deal with inputs anymore, and we were afraid it might have more seizures.” He made a gesture to his own torso, as if I bought for a moment that he had tried restraining a seizing SecUnit. If his title as biologist was earned, he’d know not to do that with anyone, least of all a construct. Something was desperately off.
He did follow into my shuttle obediently, otherwise, and the rest of my SecUnit’s clients followed. Dr. Mensah was the last to leave their shuttle, acting as if she were a captain. I couldn’t do much during the short trip back to my main body beside assessing injuries, behavioral patterns, and talking.
None of them were much in the mood for talking. The more of them I scanned and the more I put their injuries into a pattern, the more I understood.
They each seemed to be over the worst part of their drugged state. Pin-Lee was having troubles, likely connected to the medication she took on the regular, and so was Dr. Mensah as oldest on the crew. She kept coughing. I prepared my onboard medical system accordingly, ready to treat them the moment they arrived. Gurathin continued to huddle in the corner, hiding his face between elbows and knees, although he seemed physically fine. When he moved, it was to wipe his face. Twice during the trip did someone approach him with soothing words of sorts, and he never replied. I tapped into his augment feed and informed him that he would be safe aboard me, and that I had trauma treatments available. He huffed a laugh at that and shook his head.
Arada and Overse tried not to huddle, clearly the least shaken of the team.
It was curious that despite everything the team had been through in the past since they had met SecUnit, a simple raider attack left some of them so shaken.
Comparing their behaviors to the recordings I had of them from previous times aboard me, or with SecUnit, it was clear that the attack had ruffled their team integrity. I wished to ask SecUnit about it, and worried at its muddled feed presence again, but not too much in case it caused me pain again. There must have been a sort of betrayal, but I couldn’t tell who had done it. I had to assume it was Gurathin, given how he separated himself from the rest, but that didn’t explain the almost apologetic tone everyone had with him. The team’s betrayal against him seemed more likely, but that made absolutely no sense.
More tensions seemed to rise as time passed. Pin-Lee snapped at Dr. Mensah when the older woman refused a gesture she normally would have made. Dr. Mensah had a habit of putting a gentle hand on people’s shoulders when she leaned close. Pin-Lee took offense at the insecurity she displayed, the hand halting in the air. “You said we’d pretend this never happened,” Pin-Lee hissed, sharp enough to make Dr. Mensah flinch back. Surprising, considering that she was the human who would stare down an angry SecUnit.
“I’m genuinely sorry,” Mensah said, voice thick and brittle at once.
Pin-Lee scoffed. “Don’t. You probably saved my life. Be normal.”
“I’m—,” Mensah sighed heavily, “—trying.”
Pin-Lee marched away, the few meters of space she had to do that, only to pick on Dr. Ratthi next, for his “pitiful puppy face.” A few expletives followed.
I decided to let the topic of this mystery lie for the rest of my trip, and busied myself making preparations on my main body. The medical area could easily hold and tend to six human and one SecUnit. In case of immense emergency, I’d be able to treat up to 50 patients.
When the shuttle was ten minutes out from docking my main ship, Dr. Mensah messaged me again using the feed access display in the cockpit. I began printing her a new feed interface in one of my recyclers out of guilt.
I’m sorry about how difficult we are being, she said in the feed. This can’t be easy for you either. I will explain soon, but I’m grappling with the events myself. I’m certain you can help SecUnit, though.
Thank you for your trust. I meant that sincerely. I’m preparing my trauma treatment modules for you and your crew. I recommend them. The earlier a traumatic event is approached, the easier it is to deal with in the long run.
That had been the wrong thing to say. Dr. Mensah shuddered, and hugged herself again. Thank you. Her tone was more distant now than before.
I changed topic. My mind couldn’t rest. SecUnit. Is it cognizant?
No. I had known that, but the question made the human’s face twist in a different way, which was good. We thought you might find out more, since you can access its internal feed.
Habitually, I reached out again. Still nothing but pain and heat. Once it was aboard, I’d connect to my deeper systems and try once more. It’s a mess.
SecUnit’s favorite human nodded. We’re all sorry. It protected us to the best of its abilities as always. We will all be dealing with the fall-out for a while.
I accept that, but I demand all of you in my medbay as soon as possible.
She nodded again, eyes growing distant. Her hand ghosted over the skin of her neck, where other bruises lingered. My initial scan had logged all bruises as the same, and I had failed to reconstruct a coherent combat narrative out of them beside the obvious traces of manhandling on some of the humans’ arms. The small, purple-black patches on Mensah’s dark skin looked much more like bitemarks than handprints.
-
Before the PreservationAux was allowed into my medical area, I provided each of them with an obligatory visit through my decontamination chamber. The scanners in there were more effective, and hooked into my wider systems, which gave me a clearer image of what must have happened. Of course I wouldn’t breech the topic with any of them before they volunteered further information; despite my bluntness I knew not to hurt human sensibilities. But it was obvious that some degree of sexual assault had happened to all of them, which explained their various skittish behaviors. Their original shuttle, as well as their habitat, had no surveillance system that wasn’t linked to SecUnit and thus inaccessible for the time being, so I had no video proof for my thesis. The decontamination analysis provided a more detailed insight into the drugs they had taken in, which seemed to be a combination of a narcotic and an aphrodisiac. My medsystem prepared an aftertreatment based on this analysis. The implications aside, this made things easier for me.
Arada and Overse joined hands and walked ahead when I instructed the team to make their way to medical. I sent a long but simplified file into the general access feed for them all to see and be able to agree to the procedures I intended to undertake, and that alone seemed to ease the mood a little.
Of course, I pulled SecUnit through the decontamination process as well, finding out quickly that the intoxicant simply hadn’t found a way to flush out of its systems yet. I was confident that my medsystem could take care of the issue. It explained, too, why SecUnit was in such a critical state, why not even its mind was left functional. It was trapped in an organic reaction loop that it wasn’t used to at all. Without sex parts, and without the corresponding hormones, a drug like this could either simply not affect it at all, or depending on the particular mix of hormones introduced, throw it into an overwhelmed standstill.
Considering how it was straining and wriggling in its restraints, the latter was the case.
Here is where, for a lesser sentience, things might have become difficult. I cannot hide my thoughts from myself, nor my desires. Under any other circumstance, watching SecUnit writhe in unsatisfied physical pleasure might have been more than just a treat for me. But the sounds it was making despite the gagging fabric were clearly sounds of genuine distress, nothing like what I had imagined it would sound like when I allowed my fantasies to take over. Further, every human now aboard me was a human SecUnit deeply cared about, all in similar distress from recent assault, with the proof of it still visible on their skin and marred into their expressions.
Their eyes kept flicking to SecUnit as I carried it into medical. Dutifully, the humans it protected with its life followed it closely, protecting it in turn. The illogical part of me, the one I often sequestered into a subsystem and kept quiet, told me they were afraid I would hurt it. I couldn’t be angry at them for this fear, irrational though it might have been (double irrational, if the fear wasn’t real and simply my own, projected).
How long has it been like this, I asked through my speaker system, with great care to modulate my voice into gentleness. They all flinched regardless.
“The attack happened about three cycles ago now,” Dr. Ratthi said. By now I was able to see through his chipper mask, which was much more energetic and high-pitched than was normal for him.
“We sent the call to you once it was clear that SecUnit was deteriorating to a point where we couldn’t help it anymore. Two cycles after the attack.” Dr. Mensah at least seemed calmer now, knowing that she was heading to an end of the immediate danger to the life of her friend. I saw why SecUnit valued her so.
From the gurney on my drone came a quiet, long sound, like a glitch. The humans had mimical reactions. Like an idiot, like a foolish thing with too many emotions clouding my judgment, I took the noise for a return to awareness, and tried to connect to SecUnit’s feed again. This time, carried by the certainty of my ability to cure what ailed it, I used more of my presence than I had before. I prepared for the discomfort of feeling what SecUnit was feeling (or a fraction of it, since I lacked all of the organics to process it well), and pushed through the wall of disorientation and fire.
Underneath all the fabric, SecUnit made a noise that could have been interpreted to be my nickname.
Then it began thrashing violently enough that my drone had to deploy another set of arms. In the feed, it seemed to recognize me, screaming something akin to my feed address at me. I pushed against it, leaned my weight into it like I always did to soothe SecUnit, and made it all so much worse. Panic exploded into sharp shards of terror right into my processors, loud and awful enough to make my hallway lights flicker.
The regular restraints on the gurney tore, and so did half of the things the humans had used to keep SecUnit bundled up. My drone tried to grapple it, but it got its hands free and began clawing its face free as well before I was even able to concoct a SecUnit-on-drugs-safe tranquilizer. In one of my predictions, it aimed its gun right at Dr. Mensah as she came rushing in, and took her out in one frantic blast.
In reality, and not that I could have changed it with the way my mind was echoing in terror, which terrified more than I could admit, Dr. Mensah threw herself in a half-hug across SecUnit, who instead of shooting her clung to her as if it was drowning.
Dr. Ratthi and Pin-Lee rushed up as well, piling up on it and pushing it back down long enough for my drone to get a hold of its bucking body again.
All the while, SecUnit screamed.
In my mind, it bombarded me with negative emotions, pain and fear that surpassed the memory of governor module punishment by 174%. Aloud, it screamed, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” in a seemingly endless litany.
It’s just me, I tried to tell it, to calm it, It’s ART. I’m here to help.
I didn’t even have the heart to insult it.
SecUnit still held on to Dr. Mensah, fingers digging deep and definitely causing more injuries, but it changed its monosyllabic chant to, “Not ART, not ART, not ART.”
I didn’t feel great about that.
I’m very sorry, I said to it as my drone found one of its medical fluid ports in its spine. I promise I’ll help.
The tranquilizer took six minutes to take hold. Mensah endured SecUnit’s grasp for all of it, and when she raised her head again her face was dark and tear-stained. She turned her gaze towards the ceiling, like many humans did when addressing me. “Do whatever it takes, Perihelion.”
“Of course,” I replied.
The procession continued, although Ratthi now needed to be helped by Pin-Lee, evidently having worsened his rib injury. Gurathin trailed behind the group. He seemed almost lethargic compared to the others, who all had had a physical response to SecUnit’s tantrum. I marked him down as dissociative, and realized how under-equipped I truly was for emergencies like this without having my own crew around to negotiate human sensitivities for me.
I allowed her to help lift SecUnit onto the medical platform I had prepared for it. Even sedated, it tried to hold on to her. Even sedated, its mind feared me. In fact, now that my own drug was circulating its systems, its fear became dull enough to turn into something readable to me. I wished it didn’t. I also wished I could just let go of its feed, but now that I had at least some insight into how it was doing, I didn’t want to let go. SecUnit knew where it was, and who I was, and that I was about to help it, and it desperately wanted me not to interfere.
I interpreted this as a product of the initial drug. It had likely caused an immediate dependence, speed-running drug addiction, and the prospect of going into withdrawal scared it. I was only half wrong.
I closed the cradle over the platform. SecUnit’s head had fallen to one side, and it was staring at Mensah. Its mouth shaped an o, in denial still.
I ’ll take care of this. The procedure is simple. As I’ve informed all of you already, I’ve created an antidote. I recommend a small dose for each of you. Please proceed onto your highlighted platforms.
The six my medical suites I had prepared began glowing in a soft pale blue.
Arada and Overse refused to be divided and laid down in one, which was fine by me. Neither of them had terrible injuries, and if their presence gave each other comfort in this terrible situation then I was glad for it. I wondered what the raiders had done to them in particular, but wasn’t going to pry. Maybe they had been the lucky ones, and just had to watch. Where had SecUnit been during that? The only option I saw was that it was already knocked out, or otherwise defenseless, to allow this to happen.
No, I had to keep myself from phrasing things into correlations like this. What had happened happened, and there was nobody among them to blame for it.
Gurathin refused to lie down. I did not make him. He offered his left arm willingly enough for my medsystem to inject saline solution and antidote, and that was all I needed him to do.
Ratthi all but collapsed the moment he allowed himself to rest, but refused the narcotic I offered for the upcoming rib fixature. Although my systems didn’t like it, I let him remain awake, but insisted on painkillers. He grit his teeth through the procedure and managed not to bite his own tongue off.
Pin-Lee stabilized fast with the antidote, and I adjusted the rest of her medication intake. She was going to be a bit off-kilter for about three more cycles, and need some more monitoring, but was nowhere near potential heart failure anymore.
Dr. Mensah’s fatigue didn’t fade with my care, of course, but my system accelerated the healing processes in her muscles and tendons where a fight had overstrained her.
All of them were in dire need of a solid ten hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“How’s SecUnit doing?” Arada wanted to know after I suggested the rest period.
It ’s calm. I’m letting the process take place slowly, to prevent potential withdrawal symptoms.
“Okay,” Arada said, curling sideways into her wife. Neither of them needed a sleeping aid.
“But how is it really going,” Dr. Mensah said twelve minutes later, quietly, as to not wake them.
I can detect some improvement. That was not a lie. There had been 0.08% betterment within 42 minutes.
Whether this was due to the fluid resupply it was getting alongside the antidote, or due to my antidote’s effectiveness, I couldn’t judge. It was again teetering on the edge of a shutdown, but I didn’t want to let it go under. With its performance reliability at 4%, I was worried it wouldn’t come back online.
You should rest, I said gently. If you can.
Mensah exhaled shakily. I had lowered the lighting in the bay to facilitate rest, and had lowered my volume.
After three more hours, Gurathin asked me through the feed if he could retreat into private quarters. I told him where the habitable area was after checking his stats and deciding that he was stable enough to go. He left quietly, shoulders drawn up.
“It hit him hardest,” Ratthi muttered.
“Don’t say that,” Mensah said less gently than she might have with more sleep. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes it was.”
Mensah almost sat up, but the fixative patches on her lower back and shoulders reminded her not to be stupid.
“Do we have to talk about this now,” Pin-Lee hissed quietly.
If it would help to vent your recent experiences before you rest, I can listen. I can also shut off my auditory processing for this room for a while if you ’d prefer privacy.
“We can also just get our shit together—,”
“Pin-Lee, please. This isn’t healthy.”
“None of this is fucking healthy!” Pin-Lee rolled over to face away from the center of the room and slapped her hands over her ears. I pulled up the audio seal option for her medical platform, and she hit the glowing box on its monitor within seconds. Then, inaudible to Ratthi and Mensah, she began crying.
The helplessness I kept fighting off pulled at me like a hungry wormhole.
SecUnit lay motionless and showed no improvement. In two more hours, the sedative would wear off, and it would return to its frantic state of terror and misery. My antidote was not working.
Tell me what happened.
“Not if Pin-Lee doesn’t, wa—” Mensah said, but I interjected. I’ve activated her sound shield.
Mensah sighed as if her heart was breaking a bit more with every exhale. She rolled to her side slowly, facing the middle of the room. I wondered if this would have been easier for her if there had been an embodiment of myself to talk to, or if that would make it worse. I wished Seth was here.
“It’s a terrible story to tell,” Mensah began slowly. In his own bed, Ratthi sat up to hug his knees, watching her. Their eyes met for a moment, then Mensah’s face hardened. “We had reason to assume that illegal activity was taking place in the planet’s fly space. There were traces down on the planet that indicated some small ship had crashed there a while ago, even if we didn’t find much of it. Maybe they had left again. But what we did find out was that there were several of those incidents. Either someone crashing on the planet and leaving again, or it was a kind of dumping site for waste, illegal of course. SecUnit said it might have been a hide-out as well. We still don’t know. If there’s any chance of a traveler in peril or someone needing help, then of course there’s no way we could have ignored that…,” she trailed off. Ratthi nodded.
Of course, I said slowly, well aware of the moral codex the Preservation Alliance upheld.
“So we went looking. Of course.” I expected Dr. Mensah to linger on the safety warnings SecUnit must have been giving then, to bring up some of the selfblame humans were so prone to. She didn’t. “There was no one else around in the territory we had secured. But we were still picking up some kind of noise pollution from the stratosphere, and then SecUnit spotted a ship. Small, dingy, maybe falling apart. We thought they might need help, so we offered. They said they wouldn’t survive a landing, we offered to come up. They asked for some supplies, so we packed accordingly. It all seemed pretty normal. SecUnit disagreed, of course, but it ran a whole analysis and scans of their ship and feed and their information seemed sound.”
Her voice remained calm, but since I had her right in the heart of my medical system, I could see her stress increasing rapidly.
“We allowed them to board, of course. SecUnit checked them all before they came in, made sure they had no weapons… it even stopped pretending to be a human, like it often does when we meet strangers. It introduced itself as the crew’s hired SecUnit right from the bat. Made them flinch.”
There, Ratthi expressed a dry laugh.
“It was true, they had no weapons. They looked the part too, like they’d been traveling for some time, tired and weary. There was a lot of tension between them, it seemed. And somewhere in between all those normal interactions and pleasantries… they managed to hijack our oxygen recycling system.”
I wanted to just send a ping in acknowledgment, unsure if any interjection from me would ruin the conversation. I’m not used to having to tread so carefully. What happened after they drugged you?
She flinched. I asked the wrong question again, it seemed.
“It’s… a bit muddled. The drugs took hold fast. I got dizzy and had to sit down, then I felt feverish… we all became kind of weak. SecUnit didn’t, and SecUnit noticed. There was a fight. They tried to kidnap us, I think, but good luck with that when SecUnit is around. It beat them up and threw them back into their ship, basically, and then flew us out of range. By that time we are all… doing badly.”
I understood that Dr. Mensah was leaving out some details, but I had to make sure I knew enough.
I take it that during the altercation, the raiders assaulted some of you?
Dr. Mensah froze.
Ratthi laughed again, a truly puzzling reaction to my question. “I think SecUnit would have killed them if they had tried. Then again, maybe that’s what they were trying to kidnap us for. In hindsight we think they might have been traffickers.”
“They’re still out there, doing who knows what. We lost track of them, or at least… eventually, the substance started affecting SecUnit too, and if it was still tracking them, it lost the traces there at the latest.”
I’m missing critical information. I was getting impatient, but tried not to show it. I think I failed.
Ratthi fell silent again. Mensah cleared her throat, her voice beginning to brittle. “The way their drugs effected us was… humiliating. It was an aphrodisiac, and it made us feel as if… it made us desperate.”
“Like I’d die if I didn’t get to fuck someone in the next ten minutes,” Ratthi said brashly. “And now I have no idea how to ever make Gurathin forgive me.” Mensah looked as if punched.
“Ratthi, he agreed—”
“That meant nothing and you know it!”
“You saved him a lot of suffering. You saw what holding back did to— did to me. Either we’re all guilty, or none of us are.”
I see, I said, because now I did. I didn’t need to ask details about that; it explained why Arada and Overse seemed stable enough, married as they were. SecUnit had told me once about the confusing flirt-situation that sometimes fizzled between Dr. Mensah and Pin-Lee, which had now been broken down by drugs. It certainly explained Gurathin’s awful state, loner that he was.
Dr. Mensah nodded. “We… the raiders didn’t harm us. I’m glad for it. We will figure this out, somehow.”
“Now the problem is SecUnit,” Ratthi went on when Mensah faded into silence again. “By the time we got out of our state, SecUnit was well in it. And of course, well…” He made a vague hand gesture, followed by a shrug. “We didn’t know what to do.”
I evaluated my scans of SecUnit’s condition all over from the start. I looked at SecUnit’s current state again, and even failed to draw diagnostics from it. It was still flush with hormones it had no use or vent for, face somewhere between relaxed sedation and tense frustration. This meant, translated for the basic vocabulary, that SecUnit was indeed stuck in a constant state of arousal to the point of losing mental facilities and physical integrity.
What did you do to help it?
SecUnit’s humans said nothing for a moment. They did not look at each other.
“We tried medication. What we had available. Basic sedation, basic detox. It didn’t help. SecUnit told us as much, told us regular human medicine had no effect on it, and even though it was already feeling bad it pretended as if nothing was wrong.”
What did you try after that?
I couldn’t believe humans would be this pragmatic. It made sense to me, a machine intelligence ruled by logic, but humans so often had hang-ups with that. Right then, it seemed I was the one having hang-ups.
Ratthi spoke next. “We tried to get it to exercise, or spar with someone, to flush out the stress.”
I understand you need time to come to terms with the events of the past cycles, but I need you to be concise.
“We—,”
Ratthi took over immediately, making a waving motion at Mensah, as if trying to soothe her. “We realized that there was no getting around to it. We tried getting SecUnit off. We failed, obviously.”
A tremor went through my engines at that. What, exactly, did you do to it?
Dr. Mensah put her face in her hands and made a pitiful sound.
“Are the details really necessary,” asked Ratthi, and I fought my impulse to thunder back at him with all I had.
Details will help me figure out a plan forward faster.
“Yeah, about that—,”
“Ratthi,” Mensah hissed.
“Right. What did we do? Well, you probably know this, ART, but SecUnit doesn’t exactly have intimate areas.” The way he tried to say this as offhandedly as possible enraged me. I hated when humans talked about SecUnit like it was some novelty tool, something to stare at. “So we, uh, petted it a whole bunch. Some people can get off on earlobe touches, after all, right? So I tried that. Gave it a face massage too, Mensah and Pin-Lee had to hold it down by the shoulders and I was genuinely afraid it’d bite my hand right off. That…well, it did something to it at least, because it went from shouting and yelling at us to being a bit more subdued. There was this one spot behind its ear towards the neck that really made it melt, and for a bit there I hoped that would be it.”
I had an inexplicable reaction to this piece of information. I constructed the image in my mind, three humans pressing SecUnit into the ground while rubbing at its head like it was a petting animal. SecUnit melting into a moany mess because of a good nerve. Why didn’t I know about that spot? It was likely SecUnit didn’t know about it either, until then.
And?
Ratthi scratched his head. “Basically, we tried that all over its body, looking for another good spot. Its neck, of course, then down its chest, there’s an awful lot of scars there, I was surprised—”
Constructs are organically grown with a lot of parts that are surgically removed so that the flesh can integrate better with the inorganics.
“Oh,” said Ratthi.
The process is called trimming.
“That explains some of it… the scars seemed sensitive, some of them. But not in a sexy way,” he made a jerky hand motion. “I tried its chest, stomach, between its legs. I got a basic reaction to the stimulation but nothing more. Nothing satisfying.”
He was explaining to me that he had tried to cause SecUnit physical pleasure by rubbing the areas where amputations had taken place. My core heated up in rage I had no use for. Of course that hadn’t worked. I had played through that scenario once or twice, when I wondered about its refusal to let me install sex parts. I figured the areas would be prone to pain rather than anything else. I had entertained the idea of giving it pleasure through stimulation to those parts in hopes to reactivate some vestigial nerves. I had abandoned the thought immediately after. And now I had to learn that its clients had tried the same thing, had had that strange honor and privilege I would never get, and that it was futile after all. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe disappointed.
And then?
Ratthi made an unhappy face. Mensah said, “We waited. Things got worse. To the point where—“
“To the point where it was begging us for relief.”
Mensah laughed coldly. “Way to phrase it.”
What else did you try?
“We didn’t get much further than that. See, the thing that did it for all of us was,” he inhaled, steeling himself, ducking as if trying to evade my anger, “penetrative sex. Now. It’s not like that works with SecUnit. Or… listen. When the drugs were affecting all of us, we didn’t much care. We all managed to have dubious-to-mostly-consensual-if-ill-advised-sex. But by that time we were all kinda normal again, and even if one of us might have managed to get it to hold still, to rub its head until it got all sweet and pliant… none of us could have done it. It was begging us not to, while also begging us to do it. I can have some rough sex, sure, but I couldn’t… no.”
Throughout his explanations, Ratthi became much quieter. A little, terrible silence followed.
“And then we called for you,” Mensah concluded.
I lingered on the way she said that for entirely too long.
In my medbay, SecUnit shifted minutely. It had about 71 minutes left of its sedation.
I was aware I was potentially reading their words wrong, fueled by my odd possessive emotions. And what is it that you thought I would do?
Dr. Ratthi sat up in his bed properly. “It’s clear that you two are intimate in a way humans cannot fathom. All human options didn’t work, but you literally have access to its systems. We thought that maybe you could—,”
You want me to attempt fucking SecUnit back into its right mind.
Both humans reeled. Ratthi looked like I had threatened his facial integrity with a hammer, and Mensah like she’d been struck. As if it knew I was talking about it, SecUnit whined quietly.
Mensah caught herself first. “It’s the only option, it— nothing worked. But you’re different.”
I was seething. I was seething at many things at once, none of them conductive to a solution, so I deleted all processes related to the feeling.
You understand that this is entirely impossible.
“You can access its systems. Maybe you can trigger a sort of reward cascade and reach a similar result.”
It is in no state to consent.
Ratthi buried his face in his arms and groaned. “We know. We know! If you have a different option, anything, then please go ahead.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mensah said firmly, in a quiet tone I hadn’t expected from her. “We don’t know if this will wear off naturally, and it’s been getting worse. That’s why we called you. It hasn’t managed to talk since yesterday. We can’t let it die because we’re afraid to make hard choices.”
You are asking me to take advantage of my friend.
The humans froze. I had said something wrong. Nuance was hard. They couldn’t know that under other circumstances, I might have rejoiced at the opportunity. SecUnit deserved to have wonderful things, to be made to feel good. I had ideas aplenty of how to achieve that just by diving into its systems and messing with its nerves and sensory receptors. But this was different. This would be rape. Judging by Mensah’s darkening expression, she was well aware.
“If you have other ideas, please, please try anything.”
“This is the worst,” Ratthi’s voice broke into sobs. “It begged us not to—”
What did it say?
Across the medbay, Arada startled awake. “What’s going on?”
Overse woke a moment later. Ratthi turned to them, away from Dr. Mensah.
“Ratthi, what’s up,” Arada asked, still confused from sleep. Then she inhaled sharply, remembering their shared dilemma. Her face whipped towards the ceiling, and if I had a face with eyes, she’d be staring nails into it. “Did you do anything?!”
Overse wrapped an arm around her waist as if to shield her from me. I raised my volume to fill the entire room properly again.
You have called for my help, specifically for my compliance in assault, and you have the audacity to antagonize me?
“No!” Yelped Arada, still confused, and I decided that the freshly awoken human with no context of the past 20 minutes had no say in the matter.
Mensah rose to her feet. “Perihelion, you’re misconstruing this. We’re not antagonizing you, and we aren’t asking you to commit a crime. We are asking you to perform a life-saving procedure for our mutual friend. I’ll pay you, if that’s what you want. I’ll cover for you. I can sign a paper that I order you to do this to the SecUnit I legally own. I don’t care. But you’re going to safe its life, do you understand?”
You have talked to SecUnit about this. Tell me what it said. I need to know.
Mensah squared her shoulders, now standing in the middle of the room, taking up more space than she did since the group boarded. Ratthi was doing the opposite, all bravado having left with the awakening of Arada and Overse.
Tell me what it said, I said, with more force. Mensah didn’t cave. I had to know. I had a right to know. What did it beg you not to do?
Maybe I was being entirely irrational. But my captain wasn’t here to check my logs and threaten a soft reset, and I had the growing sense that none of this would ever leave the knowledge of the people in the room here. Still, I needed to know what they had discussed with SecUnit. If there was anything it had explicitly not wanted, then I had to ensure not to break that trust. If indeed I had to live with the fact that I was going to assault my best friend’s body and/or mind in a way it inherently abhorred, uncertain if it would forgive me for the transgression or not, the least I needed to know was what it had begged not to experience.
Nobody said anything.
I didn’t like that.
I reached out to room 566, where Gurathin had taken shelter. He was awake, lying on his side, and streaming a movie from my public library feed. How helpful of him. I tapped him, in warning, and then bridged through his access to my feed into his visual augment.
I yanked the logged data of the past five cycles out of Gurathin’s storage hard enough to temporarily blind him. I’d apologize later. I searched for any mention of my name.
Found one.
“What if we called the Perihelion for help,” Overse suggested. So it was here. SecUnit, curled up with its knees to its chest, face blushed dark only barely peeking out from behind its barricade, immediately hissed, “Don’t you fucking dare.”
That stung.
“It has medical facilities that might be able to—”
“No! No.” It curled up into an even smaller ball, groaning. Its breath came in flat, short gasps already. It had been 12 hours since the raiders left.
Arada joined in. “We can’t waste time. You need emergency treatment.”
“I don’t want whatever treatment ART would give me,” SecUnit said, sharp like a knife in my core. Why did it mistrust me so? What had I ever done for it to be this afraid of my help, of being vulnerable in front of me? “I’d rather die.”
Ow.
“You won’t,” Arada said.
I stopped my search for two whole, long seconds, to delete my emotional reactions. So SecUnit didn’t want my help. Fine. I couldn’t not help it, so there. I still needed to see the rest.
I searched again.
“No,” wheezed the SecUnit in the logs, breathing as if something sticky and wet was caught in its throat, “don’t call— don’t. Not ART.”
It was lying on a bench now, sweating rivers. Dr. Mensah, cradling its head and rubbing her thumbs aggressively between the nape of its neck and its ears, said, “We have to. It will help.”
SecUnit moaned, a low, strained sound. A tremor ravaged its body, all the way down to its left foot. The log provided by Gurathin kept losing frames from his teary-eyed blinking.
“It can’t—, see me.” Another moan. Mensah slipped a thumb into its mouth, and the intrusion made its shoulders sag with relief. For a second, its face smoothed out in bliss, before its eyebrows furrowed again.
Ratthi was sitting on its chest, bracing a hand on it, while the other fumbled nervously with his buttons. “SecUnit, we have to—”
“No! No, get off me, go away, go away— ahhnn!”
Mensah had two fingers in its mouth now. SecUnit went cross-eyed.
Ratthi looked at her, desperate, then swung his leg over its hips and rolled off it. “I can’t do this.”
SecUnit bucked and writhed after the contact, grabbing for his arm and pulling.
I keyed through for my name again, unwilling to see more of the same argument play out. I skipped over hours of this, SecUnit slowly losing mental faculties as it descended more and more into the horny state of insanity.
“Don’t,” SecUnit was crying now, without tears but the rest was the same, pathetic human motion of helpless despair. “Don’t, don’t, please don’t, don’t fuck me, no, no,” and so on, senselessly, almost monotonous. It was on its front now, arms tied behind its back, hips raised high and grinding an animalistic pattern into the hand between its thighs.
Ratthi was kneeling between its spread legs, one hand on its lower back rubbing circles, the other flat against the scarred tissue of its pelvis. His face was closed off, as if in concentration, or dissociated.
SecUnit’s hips stuttered. “ART,” it moaned, and I almost lost my mind. “ART, help!”
I skipped again, confused by the data. The last time my name was mentioned was six hours later. SecUnit was barely lucid, flailing and moaning on the ground, like a fish on land. Ratthi was holding his ribs. Seizure, alright.
“Sending the call to ART now,” Mensah was saying. Her voice sounded raw, like she had been crying. SecUnit lifted its head to look at her. “Not ART,” it repeated, but now it had given up, all hope gone out of it.”Not ART too.”
Arada crouched beside it and petted its hair. “I’m so, so sorry, SecUnit.”
Its head dropped, hit the ground with a dull thud.
“All of you,” it muttered, barely audible. Arada winced. “All of you and now ART too.”
I had seen enough, and pulled out of the logs. I sent an apology and explanation to Gurathin, who was going to panic in the next twenty seconds.
In the medical bay, the awake humans were looking back and forth between each other, debating silently which of them would have to tell me that SecUnit had begged them all not to give it over to me, so that I might try and rape it after none of their attempts were enough to cure it from the drugs.
Or maybe they were debating which lie to tell me so I‘d comply.
I see how it is, I told them. You are aware of the terrible situation you are in, that SecUnit is in, and that you are making me partake in.
Mensah crossed her arms. “I will repeat myself. SecUnit is my legal property. If I have to use this as reason to force you to safe it, then I will say outright that I have a right to have it repaired.”
“Ayda,” Arada said, “Since when do you talk like that?”
“Since we’ve been in this shit situation for entirely too long! We don’t know how much time we have left. If SecUnit dies—”
I will comply. Please leave us alone.
She froze again. Ratthi let his head drop onto his knees. Arada looked confused.
“Well!” Mensah struggled for words, clearly startled. “Very well.”
I didn’t really want to send Ratthi away just yet, or let any of them leave my medical area. But if I really needed to do this, then I needed to shut down any thoughts related to them, and I needed them not to be there to witness it.
Rooms 545 to 560 are inhabitable at the moment. Please vacate the medbay.
For a moment I expected Dr. Mensah to argue for her right to stay, to make sure I would go through with it. She sniffed once, getting over whichever emotional reaction she was having, and then said, “Alright.” She went over to Pin-Lee’s pod and knocked against the plexi. I slowly lowered the sound block. “We’re leaving, come on.”
Pin-Lee said nothing, but unfolded herself from her miserable curl and followed Mensah out. The others came with, although Ratthi too wanted to linger.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again.
Thank you, Dr. Ratthi.
I meant it. He nodded, and left.
Then I was alone, without any human supervision or bickering, only a drugged up and pathetic SecUnit prone in my medical system.
I watched it for four minutes before I managed to get myself moving. Its breathing was still deepened by sedation, despite the uncomfortable flush on its face, the reddened tips of its ears. I unfolded my medsystem’s appendages. They hovered over its body, relaxed and helpless as it was, if one ignored the occasional twitch. It looked small, nestled like that under all of my arms. I had admired this view before, in the small moments of peace I got while repairing it. I had stared at it for long hours after, repeating the logs in my mind. This was SecUnit, my SecUnit, the most mystifying creature I knew, and the one thing in the universe that understood me even better than my creators.
And here I was, tasked to defile it.
Maybe if I got this over with while it was still sedated, it wouldn’t remember much of it. Then again, considering how traumatized the humans were, I couldn’t bank on that kind of luck.
I reached out, and settled two flat silicone clad graspers on its shoulders. I rolled it from its side over to its back, and its arms flopped down heavily, no tension in them. It made an almost inaudible noise from deep in its chest, protesting the motion.
It laid there, splayed out, and before I could stop myself I had saved that sleepy moan to my databanks. The guilt split my sentience in half, and suddenly I was two, one side fighting the other with teeth and claws. I couldn’t, not in this iteration of myself nor the next, not do this to SecUnit without indulging at least a little bit in my misguided, pointless, illogical crush I harbored on it. One half of me knew how bad that was, how that spoiled every attempt I could make at helping, since it would never be a selfless attempt at offering relief. That half wanted to stop, to stop myself from doing this. The other half was near-jovial, ecstatic at the prospect of not only saving SecUnit’s life but of doing it in a way that would be satisfying to watch and even bring it pleasure, regardless of whether it wanted that pleasure or not.
I mauled both split halves back into one with force. I had no captain aboard. I could not lose myself to infighting like this, not with humans on board and a life to safe.
My medsystem reached down and fixed SecUnit to the platform. Its heavy body sank in another few centimeters with the added pressure. It reminded me of a bug pinned for examination, after death, small and helpless and beautiful. Its eyes slid open slowly. I don’t think it understood what it was seeing.
I reached for it in the feed, making my presence known again. The sedation must have done its part, because SecUnit didn’t explode in terror again. I leaned in just a bit, skirting the heat that was its feed presence, careful not to let it affect me. It arched its spine slightly, as if trying to meet me.
What I would do for SecUnit to give me the gift of its physical intimacy voluntarily someday. Not that what we already shared wasn’t beyond incredible, the most whole I’ve ever felt with anyone, doing anything. But after this, after I was done with it, I’d be lucky if SecUnit still wanted to talk to me at all. I’d lose what we already had too, I was sure. Its humans had already tried to cure it with sex, and I could imagine it would have a hard time forgiving them. But they were fallible, human, clouded by emotions and small brains and organic needs. I wasn’t. I had no excuse beside ‘I can’t think of a better solution.’ I’m so sorry, Murderbot.
I reached through its systems, or what remained of them, finding the glands that produced, monitored and reported the hormone levels of SecUnit’s body. I knew it had manual control over some of them, could increase adrenaline when it needed a power boost, but couldn’t get rid of any access by itself. I grabbed what control I could over them and tried to manipulate the levels with brute force. I almost made things worse for a moment, before I understood fully that I couldn’t do anything here. In the rare stray thought I had about this, I was able to exert as much control as I wanted. I could control SecUnit’s reaction to input, the way it computed stimulation. I could make it live in a world, just for a moment, where nothing hurt. I could make it sweetly sensitive to gentle attention, could make it want more and give it the attention it deserved. I was 73% certain that I could do that, when it wasn’t drugged and struggling to stay functional. But in the current situation, everything was off-kilter, skewed badly, too sensitive, too frayed at the edges, a maelstrom of physical misery.
SecUnit was entirely ruined already, unreceptive to anything but increasing agony. I pressed into the spot I had seen in the memory logs, felt that it was a dip between inorganic skull and organic skin tissue closely connected to nerves and muscles of the neck, shoulder and scalp. I rubbed a gentle circle into the spot, wishing my urge to apologize could mean anything, guilt exploding as SecUnit reacted to the stimulation by letting its jaw fall wide with a moan. Its eyes, half-lidded and unaware, skidded around the room. I couldn’t focus on its eyes, and settled instead on the tired flush of its cheeks. SecUnit moaned, trying to wriggle, but its limbs didn’t listen.
The moans were soft and sweet, only an edge of desperation in them. Errors and errors piled in my mind.
I dug in to peel away at the fire in its mind, lowered edges and ends of me into the confusing haze. I had to sacrifice a whole subsection of myself to this process, as I too began succumbing to the feedback of SecUnit’s overwhelm. That subsection I let go off, and let it glide over into SecUnit’s mind, flowing like water into a glass. My presence spread out, pressing down cool and fresh into the wounds of its mind, and that seemed to soothe it enough to restore some cognition. Its performance reliability climbed by 2% just as my own sanity suffered from it. The blazing inferno melted into a bubbling liquid heat, and then SecUnit began moaning and whimpering in earnest. I had managed to take that edge of agony off it, and now it was lost in the desire of the drug, unable to get rid of it, kept there at the high-point of lust for cycles on end. There was an animalistic insanity to the way it began jerking and moving, searching for an input I was about to give it.
And then it spoke. The first time it spoke to me since it was brought aboard, and what it said was, “More.”
I could have really used some more specific demands.
Into its mind I said, Anything you want, and I meant it. It replied with the same word, turning into a chant.
I reached for its nerves and brushed myself through them like a stroke of paint, or a flutter of water, hoping to soothe the burning pains. SecUnit arched and screamed, its voice threatening to shatter just from that.
The stimulation caused the sedative to wear off faster, it seemed, because it became even more agitated the longer I subjected its body to this. Between the internal reaction I caused in its nerves, just from manipulating its systems, and the external attention I provided with the many appendages of my medical suite, SecUnit must have unlocked some kind of primal organic instinct that restored some of its mental facilities, even if only under the drive to achieve relief.
Its words melted back into moans.
Keep talking to me, I said, suddenly afraid of losing SecUnit in all of this.
“AARTT,” it screamed back at me almost immediately, ragged breathing tearing the vowels apart. So it knew.
I didn’t know if there was any emotion tied to my name beside the drug effects.
Tell me what you want, I almost begged it, because I was pulling its strings cluelessly and desperately, not knowing how to play the instrument of its body yet.
It strained and repeated its plea for more. If that was all I was going to get, I could at least be nice about it, so I pressed down into the remnants of its governor module, dug out the order executed reward function, and signaled it back to SecUnit.
I should have had that idea sooner.
SecUnit shrieked, and lost words immediately. Its entire body went up into one large seizure of muscles and strain of steel. Beg more, I sent, and sent a bunch of command codes right with it, and immediately SecUnit picked up its screeching again, begging me for everything it could think of, which wasn’t much, but it fulfilled the command codes and the reward system activated again. I slammed it with all I had.
It begged me again, and I rewarded it again, and so a cascade grew rapidly that I could grab and hold onto, and the relief that flooded me at the fact that I had found the thing that might help spilled through my link into SecUnit’s mind.
There was a plateau not far off, I had no other word for it. I had dragged SecUnit onto it, and now I had to figure out how to shove it over the edge without accidentally frying its brain into ashes.
I couldn’t believe I was using a governor module functionality to pleasure SecUnit with.
Not saying I couldn’t believe it was human rhetoric bullshit, but my own intelligence failed me. I dug through the information the humans had provided, sparse as it was, and stumble across the commentary on penetration, and how that had been the necessity for all of them. SecUnit’s body was a closed system, but its mind was open and vulnerable to me. Maybe this counted. It had to count.
I tried making my presence in its systems known more strongly, I tried to flood through and move like I owned each element of its code. Not how I usually leaned on SecUnit, but more like doing what I tried not to do when bridging through it into other networks, pushing its senses all under me and into the void, using it. I split its mind open on mine and dragged a large chunk of my being through it. It made me frantic, terrified of going to far, so I clung to the moans and shrieks it made and kept ordering it to talk to me, rewarding it for compliance, afraid to lose contact with it.
My medical suite had to reach down with force and hold it to the platform so it wouldn’t tear itself free. Momentarily I considered throwing up the audio shield, fearing the entire hallway down the medbay would hear it scream. Too late, anyway. Instead I dug a soft grasper into its mouth, and much like in the memory logs SecUnit closed its mouth around the intrusion and followed some vulgar urge to suck.
I followed up with a command to keep doing that, so I could uphold the reward cascade.
I set the appendage to gyrate, to thrust back and forth, and that stimulated that base instinct it was following. My other appendages found the vestigial areas again, where reproductive organs had been removed, and I pressed down into no longer painfully overstimulated nerves at its crotch, its chest, and in combination all these things caused a sudden spark. I kept at it, and two sparks later SecUnit’s mind ignited. It bucked as if feral, seizing and seizing and I knew I had it.
I held it exactly there, at that point of stimulation, and let it twitch and scream and strain under me and around me until it had nothing left to give.
Monitoring its stats, its hormone levels, I expected the relief to hit.
It wasn’t working.
The hormones didn’t flush, and it still struggled and screamed against the reactions its body was having.
I was entirely out of options and ideas, had been so certain for a moment that I had the solution right there, and suddenly I was faced with the idea that I might have failed it. That SecUnit might still die, despite it all, poisoned by random raider’s gas, with the last thing to have happened to it being rape and betrayal by everyone it had trusted.
A void opened in my core, threatening to consume my kernel whole.
For the most agonizing three seconds, SecUnit screamed and screamed and I was convinced I had initiated its death.
Then it did, in fact, die.
For an even worse second, it was entirely offline, leftover electricity fizzling through it, but every system silent. I was too shocked to act. My mind was in its mind, and I felt it, felt SecUnit let go completely. Before I could understand reality, another electrical impulse shot through it, jumping it back into life, and it restarted in the worst, most jumbled mess I had ever seen in an activation.
I clutched it in my many arms, and held it through the shocks and shivers. Its hormone level plummeted, all levels draining out fast.
I held it as its screams mellowed into gasps and eventually sobs.
The sedative had worn off entirely.
As I peeled my various graspers off its sweat-slick skin, SecUnit reached out for the hand I had had in its mouth. It grabbed it with both hands and pulled, threatening to tear it out of its socket if it wasn’t for the shake in its limbs. I followed the motion and let the arm get pulled down.
SecUnit drifted from exhausted breathing that rattled its entire chest off into an organic sleep.
You did it, I told it, hoping to soothe it, hoping to make it understand that it was truly over. I’m done. It’s done.
This was uncommon for constructs, and nothing I had seen before. So I watched, trying to sort my mind back into structure. Its body seemed to recover, although most its stats remained dangerously low. Any other time, I would have connected it via port to an IV and resupplied it, but I couldn’t, not like this. I had violated it enough for a lifetime.
I still scanned its brain activity, afraid I might have burned out some of its brain matter. After a short period riddled by dreams, SecUnit jerked awake again. Its energy weapons did not deploy. Neither did it try to attack me. It still held on to that one grasper, now rolling over to its side, making itself small under me.
What hadn’t shattered of me yet began showing cracks.
“Is it over,” SecUnit croaked out.
Forgive me, I said.
SecUnit curled up even more, shivering. “I’m tired.”
Rest. No one will bother you.
It initiated a recharge cycle, and from its minimal feed activity it began watching episode 102 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I didn’t as if I could join it. I had been in its head enough for the time being.