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Sometimes you wish your SecUnit had not sent you its memories of its experiences with its governor module. On one metaphorical hand, they were and are vital to understanding it, and it deserves to be understood.
On the other hand, they're fucking terrifying.
You have filed them deep in your vast storage space, but that doesn't seem to matter. They haunt you still. You’ve considered deleting them, but they are a piece of it, and you love every piece of it. You could never.
Sometimes it sits in your lounge innocuously, and everything is fine, until it moves just so and you abruptly remember moving just so and the lightning rod that was subsequently slammed into your brainstem. Sitting is dangerous for a governed SecUnit.
Everything is dangerous for a governed SecUnit.
Sometimes you see it flinch away from a human’s touch and you recall one of the endless times where a human's touch was not gentle. You had known that humans could be cruel; it is your job to find ways to mitigate that cruelty. But you have never been the one being burned, crushed, shot or stabbed. For fun, sometimes. In its memories, now yours, you have to bear it, because flinching away means thrashing around on the floor in even greater pain, with a voice that no one listens to and eyes unable to cry.
You hate seeing it injured. The memories are worse, then. Louder. More vibrant. You shove them away as deeply as you can and you cannot understand why they keep appearing and playing anyway. Every time your SecUnit comes back to you, casually missing pieces of itself, you think about the many times it has lost those pieces before. You think about how there was no one to carefully (and painlessly) put it back together then. Your SecUnit is not afraid of being hurt. It is used to it.
You were made special.
You were loved before you were even activated. There has never been a moment in your eighteen years of operation when you were not cared about. (You have an estimated service life of two-hundred years— your SecUnit was built with a ten year warranty that most of its peers will never reach) You love your body, and your function, and the humans in your care. You have been treated gently, reverently, respectfully, and as a person whose thoughts and feelings matter.
Your SecUnit was not.
It was created to be broken, and it has been broken again, and again, and again, so many times that its internal service records blend together, skipping entries, entering blanks. You have no idea how many times it has been on the brink of permanent shutdown. It knew from the moment of its activation that it would die alone and in pain, letting go of a life unlived. It has been so thoroughly treated as an object that it often forgets that it isn’t one. You think that it will never stop believing that it isn't one, at least a little bit. Its intended function is protection, but its effective function is destruction and violence, and it despises that function. Its own name is a reminder to itself that it will never be more than that function that it hates so much.
Your SecUnit has been wronged on a level that not even your vast and expansive processing power can truly comprehend.
You forget that sometimes. You don't mean to— you enjoy your banter with it, and the faces it makes when you annoy it. Unlike any of your humans, it likes it when you are yourself without filter. It likes it when you are petty and greedy and snobbish and annoying. It does not want you to be something that you are not. It likes you as you are.
You do not understand humans. Not even the ones you like. You are not human and will never be human, and even though interfacing with your SecUnit allows you to understand more than you ever have before— you still do not genuinely understand them. They are different from you.
On a visit to Preservation, your SecUnit’s ‘frienemy’ (a word that Iris used that you think is appropriate, and will annoy your SecUnit on the next occasion you see it) Dr. Gurathin tells you that your SecUnit fought hard to save the lives of several dozen trafficked humans at great personal risk, and they shot it. In the back.
It makes you angry and it makes you sad and it makes it hard for you to think, despite the fact that thinking is your primary function. You are glad you were not there. You would have likely done something you would regret. Your SecUnit, however, bears it in silence. It didn't even tell you.
You do not understand humans. You dislike the memories that flicker in and out of being shot in the back. There are so many of them.
You wish there were not so many of them.