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I was helping Kaede out of a gravel pit when my legs decided to stop working. I didn’t know exactly what a CDT-1328 was, but I did know that I had generated an error code reporting that my CDT-1328 had suffered a critical failure. The effect of the critical failure became obvious when I crumpled over and fell flat on my face.
I was just glad that I had somehow managed to avoid hitting Kaede when I flopped over like a fish.
“SecUnit!” Kaede reacted, scrabbling the rest of the way out of gravel pit onto solid ground. She sank down onto her knees, and reached out to grab my shoulder. Thankfully, she hesitated before she actually touched me.
“I’m not going to sink in,” I reported, knowing that would be the humans' first concern. My legs (which, likely for CDT-1328 related reasons, I currently could not move) were still in the gravel pit, but I had enough of my weight on the solid ground that I wasn’t about to sink into the gravel and get buried.
If a human got buried in the gravel, they would suffocate, which was why I was on this field operation in the first place. I’d be fine though, even if I didn’t exactly want to go for a dive in the gravel pit. I wouldn't stand a chance at getting the gravel out of all of my crevices afterward unless I got ART’s surgical suite involved.
“What happened?” Ratthi demanded, jogging over to us. I was just glad he kept a wide berth from the border of the gravel pit.
“Component failure,” I reported. “We need to abort this field operation.” Aborting the field operation because I was broken was kind of ironic, because the whole reason I was here was to keep the humans from getting broken. I sure wasn’t here to take geological measurements. It was a little embarrassing. I was glad that my face was currently smushed into the ground.
“Aborting,” Kaede said, sending the signal to the rest of the crew at our main site.
“Component failure?” Ratthi echoed questioningly, squatting down next to me.
“I can’t move my legs.” This was so fucking embarrassing. “We need a retrieval.”
“Is everything going to be okay?” Kaede asked Ratthi, worry bleeding into her voice. “I’ve already requested the retrieval.”
“A Three-trieval?” Ratthi asked me.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“SecUnit’s going to be fine,” Ratthi told Kaede.
By the time Iris and Three showed up in the secondary hopper, everyone, including ART, was freaking the fuck out on the mission feed. Have I mentioned yet how embarrassing this was?
I had sent ART a copy of my error report identifying the problem hoping it would distract ART enough to get it to shut up. At least until I wasn’t laying on the ground half buried in gravel anymore.
No such luck.
It was currently analyzing what the fuck a CDT-1328 was and whether the humans needed to shuttle me back to ART for me to get repaired, or if we could do it in the emergency human MedSystem that we had set up in the habitat at our main mission site.
I was grateful for the distraction when Three and Iris pulled up in the secondary hopper. Iris brought it to a smooth landing. As soon as the hopper stopped moving, Three popped out and hit the ground. It was also tuned in to ART’s ongoing mechanical analysis, and knew what my problem was.
“You should take the primary hopper back to base,” Three told Ratthi and Kaede. “Iris and I will transport SecUnit in the secondary hopper.”
“Do you need help getting SecUnit aboard?” Ratthi asked it.
“No,” Three said. “Step aside please.” The humans backed off, and Three asked me, “Are you in any pain?”
“No,” I told it, “Purely mechanical problem.”
“Good,” Three said. Then it bent over and pulled me out of the gravel pit, before picking me up the rest of the way, one arm hooked under my knees and the other at my mid-back. I held onto its neck for extra support.
Yeah, still pretty fucking embarrassing.
As it maneuvered my body, I could feel gravel stuck in my knee joint, irritating the organic part of my upper leg. Three brought me into the hopper, and set me down on one of the passenger seats. It reached to help with the restraints but I slapped its hand away. “My upper body works fine,” I told it. I could strap myself in, it wasn’t like I was a traumatized client or something.
Three said nothing, it just walked away, back outside to help Ratthi and Kaede pack up the geological equipment.
So yeah, I was having a pretty shitty day.
We got back to base, and I endured more manhandling by Three to get into our habitat from the hopper. ART’s analysis of my damage report was still ongoing, which I was starting to think was a really bad sign.
Three seemed nervous too. It dumped me in Medical so that the humans could take a look at what was going on with me and send ART more data about my condition. It hovered nearby as I lay on my stomach, letting Matteo and Martyn poke around my insides.
They set to removing the outer casing of some of the inorganic parts on my back. Martyn labeled each piece according to my specs as Matteo carefully disassembled me. Once they got past the outer layers Matteo said, “That can’t be good.”
I used one of my drones to get a closer look at what they were seeing, and unfortunately, I agreed. My diagnostic report and specs had indicated that my CDT-1328 was a component that interfaced between the organic part of my spinal cord and the inorganic parts of my legs. My damage report indicated that an internal piece within the component had failed, and the effect was obvious now that I could see it visually. The structure of the component had failed entirely, snapping its connections to my legs in the process.
The effect of the damage was that I couldn’t move my lower body using the human parts of my brain, or my internal interfaces. All because a tiny piece of the CDT-1328, no more than two millimeters in length, had snapped.
Alright, so that was design flaw number thirteen to hold against the company forever. (I’m always looking for new material.)
ART was already in my feed, so I asked it, What do you think? It had been uncharacteristically quiet while running its analysis since Three and Iris had retrieved me.
I have bad news, ART said, on a channel that also included Three, Martyn, and Matteo.
Well, that was terrifying.
“What is it, Peri?” Martyn asked.
I have explored all possible options, and determined that there is no viable way to repair this component or manufacture a replacement using my onboard facilities, or any facilities that have been installed on the planet.
“Well shit,” said Matteo, which was a sentiment I agreed with.
I recommend that we abort this mission. We should return to the University, where there is a facility capable of manufacturing a replacement, ART said.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can’t just abort the whole mission,” I said.
To be fair, I thought this coda to our mission was kind of fucking boring. We had already completed our primary directive in this system: chase off the corporate fuckheads that were trying to forcibly colonize the terraformed, freehold planet in the system. In the course of the invasion, the corporation had set up shop on this moon and started stripping it for resources. They had also destroyed most of the local spacecraft. Now that we’d wrapped up chasing off the fuckheads, we were doing the locals one more favor by assessing the level of damage the fuckheads had managed to do to their moon.
I knew that if we aborted we’d just have to come back and finish the job afterward. ART's humans weren't going to leave the locals hanging. I’d rather be spared the thirteen day wormhole trip each way just to go back to a backwater I’d already visited once before, thanks.
Our security team is compromised, ART said.
“Three’s right here, and it’s fine,” I said. “I can provide remote support. We only do one excursion per day anyway. We can totally finish this, then go home and fix me.”
“I think we need to loop Seth into this discussion,” said Martyn, “He’s the captain, it’s his call.”
ART alerted Seth to join the conversation, and after a few minutes, he jogged into Medical to join us. Of course, he could’ve just talked to us on the feed, but I guess I always need more humans to ogle me when I’m broken, after all.
Martyn told Seth, “SecUnit has a broken component we don’t have the means to fix until we return to base. Peri wants to abort, but SecUnit thinks we should finish the mission here, first.”
Seth seemed to think about it for a moment, touching his lip briefly. Then, he asked, “Three, what do you think?”
Three looked mildly alarmed that Seth wanted its opinion, but it answered, “My own security protocols are in agreement with SecUnit’s protocols. A single SecUnit is sufficient to provide security to a group of this size performing ground operations.” Three didn’t make a direct recommendation, but it deflected that often.
Seth said, “Thank you, Three.”
I do not think this is a good idea. SecUnit is a sitting target, ART insisted.
Don’t nanny me, I told it. Three is more more than capable of handling this. It will take care of the humans.
I am worried about you, ART said.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. So I said nothing.
Seth had been pacing around the room during that back and forth, contemplating the problem. “What do you think?” He asked Martyn.
Martyn shrugged. “The corporates are gone, there’s no way they’ll regroup for months. The only hazards are natural, and we’re almost done, anyways.”
Seth sighed, and said, “We’re not aborting. We’re still on track to finish our assessments here in seven days, let’s just get this over with.”
ART made a big deal about angrily leaving the conversation in the feed, but whatever. I won the argument. Yippee.
“Do you want us to take the broken part out for now, SecUnit?” Martyn asked.
“Disconnect the fluid lines and wires, then leave it,” I said. The humans nodded. I figured even if the component wasn’t functional, it might also serve as structural support in some fashion that I didn’t want to mess with by removing it entirely. Even though I had access to my specs, how all the parts worked together was still a bit opaque, even to me. It made maintenance difficult.
Matteo carefully started disconnecting anything fragile from the broken component, and then started to reassemble my back.
“I wonder how something like this happens in the first place,” Matteo said, biting his bottom lip.
“Normal wear and tear,” I said.
“Barrish-Estranza would perform preventative maintenance on SecUnit's after every deployment,” Three said carefully.
“I'd just get pulled out of service for maintenance every 9,000 hours,” I said.
Three asked me over the feed, Have you had any preventative maintenance done since you left the company?
I pretended I didn’t see the message, not because I thought I could get away with it, but ART had already started pinging me reproachfully and between Three, ART, and the humans, I was getting enough shit right now.
“I see,” Martyn said, thoughtfully.
The humans started talking about reassembling me and I tuned it out. I was panicking a little more than I dared let show. I’d never been out of commission like this before, or at least conscious for it, and it was frightening.
There was already an image in my mind of a pack of raving fauna charging in to destroy the habitat and I could imagine Ratthi or Iris getting hurt, or killed, because I wasn’t able to help them get out in time.
Regardless of the fact that we hadn’t seen any evidence of fauna on this moon that were larger than domestic cats.
(Raving fauna killing the humans was always a distinct, if remote possibility, except perhaps in the vacuum of space.)
As Matteo finished screwing in the final piece on my low back panel, he asked, “So, do you want to stay here in Medical, or…?”
“Three can take me back to the security room,” I said. I think the only thing more embarrassing than getting carried again was getting rolled around on the gurney. Since neither of my legs was working, crutches weren’t a viable option. We hadn’t brought the wheelchair from ART’s medical supplies down to the moon, either.
At least Three could get me out of there quickly.
Through my drone I saw a surprised look flicker across Three’s face, quickly replaced by its SecUnit mask of indifference. It was getting better at hiding the genuine expressions it didn’t want to show, but unlike me, it still defaulted to the SecUnit 'blank stare’.
(I thought I had gotten pretty good at making a genuine, human-neutral expression, but Amena had told me once that my normal expression usually looked like I smelled something bad, so maybe somehow I was still even worse at hiding my emotions than Three.)
“Of course,” Three said.
The humans helped Three turn me back over on the gurney, and then it picked me up, supporting my back and legs like it would an injured client, which I had effectively become. The humans were saying things and I wasn’t listening. If it mattered, I could replay it again later.
Seeing as I was effectively dead-weight until we got back to the university, keeping me in the loop probably wasn’t going to be that important anyways.
Thankfully, the security room we’d set up was further from the human common area than Medical, so we didn’t cross anyone’s path as Three brought me over. Once inside, it set me down on the couch we’d brought in, because we both preferred couch-style furniture to actual bunks.
Thanks, I told it. I was staring at the ceiling, my mind reeling. I’d tried to start watching an episode of Sanctuary Moon while it had carried me and I hadn’t even been able to pay attention. I was that out of it.
I don’t like the humans looking at me when I’m injured, either, Three said.
That was the thing about Three, I think that still made me wary of it. Murderbot 2.0 had sent it my memories, and because of that, it knew me far too well. Often, it felt like Three was reading my mind. Sometimes it felt like all that I really knew for sure about Three was that it was also a SecUnit.
It was a cognitive bias, but I assumed sometimes that it would react to things the same way that I did because it was a SecUnit, and I’d been proven wrong plenty of times. Then I would wonder if being a SecUnit was even actually the reason that I would react that way.
Three and I could work together fine, but talking about anything that wasn’t relevant to a mission was harder. Especially when we were both socially awkward constructs that had literally been classically conditioned to ignore our feelings.
“I fucking hate it,” I said, aloud.
I was still wearing my field suit on my lower body. The field suit was basically light-weight, modified body armor. The humans had removed the upper body portion in order to access my back, but there hadn’t been a reason to take off the pants and boots.
I could hardly feel my legs with the broken component, but it still wasn’t exactly comfortable to wear ten pounds of clothing.
I didn’t want to ask for help, but I couldn’t get it off myself. “Can you help me take off the field suit?”
“Of course,” Three said, softly. It leaned over me, removing the boots first. It put them away in my storage space, then it helped peel off the body armor on my legs. There was so much gravel stuck in the body armor, but it had gotten into my legs too, and it was irritating. The gravel skittered onto the floor as Three removed the body suit. It’d probably have to sweep it up later, it was a trip hazard for the humans.
I was glad to be rid of the field suit. If I had to drag myself around somewhere with just my hands it’d be easier without the field suit as deadweight.
“Thank you,” I told Three.
Three wasn’t looking at me as it put my body armor away, but I knew that it was using a drone to watch me. After a moment, it said, “You didn’t answer my question before.”
“What question?”
It said, exasperated, “How long has it been since you had preventative maintenance?”
I was staring at the company logo engraved into my mechanical knee cap when I said, “Not since before Mensah purchased me from the company.”
“SecUnit, that—” Three was dumbfounded for a moment, “You are extremely overdue.”
“I don’t like humans messing with my parts when they don't have to, and no one really knows how to do it, anyways.” I had checked with ART, but it couldn’t perform procedures that weren’t in its database, and SecUnit specs were proprietary. It did repairs on me using my diagnostic reports, but I didn’t get diagnostics for preventative maintenance. It was something that the company did while I was out of service, I didn’t need to know about it.
“They didn’t give Dr. Mensah a service guide?” Three asked.
“They tried to sell her a service plan,” I said. No way was I desperate enough to keep a CDT-1328 functional that I’d power down to let a company SecUnit Technician open me up and start messing with my parts ever again.
“I can help you do it,” Three said.
“What?”
“SecUnits One, Two, and I were responsible for performing most of our preventative maintenance on each other,” Three said. When I didn’t say anything, Three continued, “I would like to help you perform preventative maintenance. It would make me very happy if you helped me with mine, once the humans have repaired you.”
I gave in. “Okay,” I said.
“The humans aren’t going out again today,” Three said, slowly. It tended to speak more carefully when it got nervous, like it was worried whatever it was about to say was going to come out wrong. “Can I start now? I want to help you remove the gravel.”
“That’s not exactly preventative,” I groused.
It gave me an unimpressed look.
I looked up at the ceiling. “I guess,” I told it.
We had a wheeled desk chair in the security room, and Three rolled it over to the end of the couch, by my feet. “I’ll make sure your legs are in optimal condition before the humans have replaced the defective component,” it promised me.
Three and I had very similar specs. Its body was kind of like an upgraded version of mine. So it made sense that we’d be able to help each other with this, and we had already sent each other our specs for mission planning purposes. If it knew how to maintain my parts, it could teach me to take care of its parts, too.
It was a good idea. I didn’t know why it made me want to crawl the walls, but luckily for Three I could hardly move under my own power anyway.
This was for my own good. But I was still suspicious of it.
Three took a small toolkit out of its closet, sat down in the desk chair, and began unscrewing the casing on my ankle. It said, “I am… very glad that you trust me to protect the humans when you are unable to operate at full capacity.”
“Of course I trust you,” I said. “You literally just saved my stupid ass.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Three said. “All components fail, eventually. It was unfortunate that it was a complex component this time.”
“I got defeated by a gravel pit.”
Via the feed, Three sent me a photo of a human pretending to talk to a wall.
“You should spend less time with Iris,” I told it.
Three was currently disassembling my foot, which I probably would’ve found more concerning if I was capable of moving it. “What are you even doing?” I asked.
“Disassembly is the best way to remove the gravel. I’m going to check to see how each of the parts are aging and lubricate the joints while I’m at it, ” It said carefully. It held up one of my shock absorbers, and smiled softly. “There’s a lot of moving parts in our feet that get subjected to extreme pressure.” It dropped a couple tiny screws onto the table next to our couch. “We can make sure we have spare parts on hand for the ones that are more degraded, so this doesn’t happen again.” It waved a hand obliquely, still holding a small screwdriver.
“How often did you do this with One and Two?” I asked it.
“We helped each other with routine maintenance after every operation,” It said. “A little at a time. Cleaning on-board weapons, lubricating joints, monitoring wire connections.”
“I see.”
“It was… comforting,” Three ventured. “We were always together, but the governor module didn’t allow us to speak freely outside of mission objectives.”
Three was holding one part of my ankle joint, inspecting it carefully. Its gaze intent on the gleaming metal it said, “I cared for them. I could show them by doing this. I don’t know…”
The ending of that sentence seemed to hang in the air. I wondered what it had stopped itself from saying. I don’t know if they understood. I don’t know if they felt the same.
Three didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, it began to delicately screw my ankle joint back together. “The components on your feet are starting to degrade,” It said. “I think they’ll be alright, for awhile longer, but we should make sure that Perihelion has the materials to reprint on standby. Luckily, our feet are wholly mechanical.”
I said, “They had to know you cared.”
Three froze.
“SecUnits aren’t gentle,” I said. “This is.”
Three started to turn the screwdriver in again, slowly. I thought if it were human that its hands would be shaking. It said, softly, "I think SecUnits can be gentle.”
In the silence, Three re-assembled my foot. It moved onto the other one, repeating the process. Its expression was strained.
I steeled myself, and said, "I'm sorry.”
“I realized how long it has been since I thought of them,” Three said, its voice wavering a little. “I—” It broke off, shaking its head.
Three pushed a memory to me in the feed, and I opened it. A Barrish-Estranza ready room, Three’s own foot a mangled disaster of metal, too deformed to stand in the cubicle. A SecUnit bent over it, disconnecting it from the leg, trying to conserve as many of Three’s components as it could, another SecUnit standing behind Three’s head on the other side of the gurney, their hands planted on its shoulders. Three could feel the heat of their body through their hands, the other SecUnit having increased their body temperature.
Three had never sent me a memory from before. It had only sent me recent memories, for combat analytical purposes.
“I never—”
“I know,” It said, cutting me off. “I should stop using you as a replacement, I know.”
“Look, Three,” I said, “I know I’m—” I screwed my eyes shut. “I know I’m difficult. But Three, if I didn’t trust you, if I didn’t like you, you wouldn’t be touching me right now.”
It had frozen again, shutting its eyes, its hand trembling, almost imperceptibly.
“I’d do this for you too,” I said.
“Thank you,” Three whispered. “I wanted to help you with this, even before you were hurt, but I didn’t know how to ask. I didn’t know it would affect me like this.”
It got back to work. I could see my inorganic parts gleaming where Three had wiped them clean. When it finished, Three said, “We will take care of each other.”
“We will.”