Chapter Text
There’s a rocking chair in SecUnit’s room.
(It’s weird, having a room. It doesn’t feel right. Though it’s not actually sure what right feels like. So maybe it doesn’t know anything. Which seems accurate.)
It doesn’t sit—without its armor, sitting isn’t uncomfortable anymore, except for how it is—but it does rock the chair back and forth, nudging it with the palm of its hand while it watches The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
It watched TV with Ratthi the other day. They watched a few different shows, but SecUnit always wanted to go back to Sanctuary Moon. Ratthi was so happy about that SecUnit thought he was going to cry, which was deeply disturbing, and when SecUnit asked why, it wasn’t sure if the answer, that it had been its favorite show before, made things better or worse.
(It’s told that it also watched MedCenter Argala, but in the first episode of that serial someone was strapped to a metal bed and that was when Ratthi turned the screen off and SecUnit realized that it had physically covered its eyes.
“No, no, it’s all right, Seccy,” Ratthi had said when SecUnit removed its hands from its face as though they were covered in acid and proceeded to look at them in abject horror. “You communicated with me, that’s great.”
SecUnit balled its hands into fists as though that would make them more familiar.
When it blinked, for a moment it saw human blood.)
There’s no specific reason that SecUnit pushes the rocking chair, and no specific reason it pushed it the first time, an experimental motion that seemed to cheer Dr. Mensah up in some confounding way.
At this point it’s become something its body is used to, a simple soothing motion.
(Its body is used to more things than its brain knows, because its body is a used thing.)
The chair makes a creaking sound that should be unpleasant and might, in fact, be unpleasant. It has no effect on SecUnit’s enjoyment of Sanctuary Moon.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
It wonders if rocking chairs are supposed to make that sound. It could ask, maybe. Its probability assessment does not give that inquiry a high chance of causing human sadness like its inquiry about getting melted down did last night.
It’s after watching episode seven of season two of Sanctuary Moon that SecUnit rescans the chair and figures out that there’s something wrong with it. It’s a realization that’s both irritating and disturbing, especially since it isn’t certain if it missed something from day one. It doesn’t know whether it would be worse to have, in fact, missed the issue, or to have noticed and forgotten.
It has been on Preservation for [TEMPORAL DATA CALCULATION 0WK5D7H] and there is a 91% chance that this is the first time it’s realized there’s something wrong with the chair. (Not 100%. Its recall is no longer capable of operating at 100%.
Its programming wants it to inform its owner of defects, but it doesn’t want to, so it doesn’t do it.
It’s the humans’ own fault for disabling its governor module.)
The point.
The point is.
SecUnit has mostly existed in metal places. Metal tables it had to lie on, metal chairs it couldn’t sit on, shiny metal walls, metal armor, metal insides…
It is unaccustomed to wood, and it is unaccustomed to rotting things—
(Though there is something in its organics that wonders if that’s true. Organic bodies rot. Construct bodies rot too. If they’re left alone long enough. They stink under their armor.)
—but now it realizes that the wood of the chair is rotting at the edges.
SecUnit thinks that even though the chair is very large—unusually large, considering the average size of people on Preservation—it would’ve fallen apart if it had actually tried to sit in it. It’s either good or bad that it never tried to sit in it. It’s not good at holding two realities at the same time, so it settles on good, because it would’ve been embarrassing and stressful to destroy the chair by accident, just another sign of how out of place SecUnit is here, and there are already a lot of those.
Anyway. There are various factors playing into the fact that, until now, it hadn’t noticed the rotting or the encroaching mold. Disgust and shame sting its mind.
There’s very little about mold in its education modules, but episode seven of season two of Sanctuary Moon has recently informed it that mold can be a catastrophic thing.
And SecUnit has been sharing a rest area with mold, and done nothing about it.
Well. Okay. It can’t change the past. It heard Dr. Mensah say that once.
(It thinks it’s supposed to be able to recall exactly when it heard her say it. Whatever.)
SecUnit is made to subdue much more threatening, challenging, and animate hostiles than a moldy rocking chair, but this is the first true hostile it has come across on Preservation, and it has let it endanger its client for too long.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: 13%. Its threat assessment is absolute shit. It needs to eliminate the hostile right now.
When it’s wearing its armor, it has easy access to its gun ports. It’s not wearing its armor. It’s wearing a dark green shirt with sleeves that cut off just above its wrists, loose dark green pants that don’t go below its ankles, and gray shoes that slip on. All of the colors are muted. Still more colors than SecUnit has ever had on its body all at once.
It shoves its sleeves up.
But then it sees the gun ports, or rather, the strips of tough cloth over them, and it hesitates.
“They’re pretty much just fake leather,” Pin-Lee explained while SecUnit stared blankly at the strips of fabric on the table. “They should fit over your gun ports.” SecUnit said nothing. Pin-Lee continued to speak. “Look, SecUnit, Preservation’s Ethics Board said this was the path of least potential harm to you and the planet. It’s like a lock on your guns to remind you that usually here you’re not gonna have to shoot anything. Actually, shooting stuff is pretty discouraged.”
Shooting stuff is pretty discouraged. Just offhand, shooting stuff is discouraged? “Without even considering the situation?”
“No, the point is we do consider the situation. And then, pretty much 100% of the time, we decide there’s a better thing to do than shoot stuff.”
“Stand down,” SecUnit says, a hollow echo of words that haven’t been said.
“Sure. Okay, sure. Stand down.”
Stand down.
It stands down.
Its guns would easily tear through the fake leather. Obviously. It was stupid to cover its gun ports in the first place, but SecUnit knew that there were people on Preservation who’d wanted its guns disabled entirely. It’s lucky that they even bothered to come up with a compromise.
And maybe it shouldn’t blow anything up in Mensah’s house. Her spouses already seem somewhat wary of it, which is fair. No one tries to stick something that isn’t terrifying in an acid bath.
SecUnit pushes its sleeves back down.
Fine. No guns. It’s still a Security Unit, and it has plenty of ways to destroy things without guns. Its main purpose is to destroy things. It knows this, in spite of what its buffer says. It’s the kind of thing it has always known, the kind of knowledge that survives mind wipes.
Option two for eliminating the hostile is hand-to-hand. Only one pair of hands is involved. Easy.
Mensah doesn’t realize that there’s always danger somewhere, but SecUnit is here to protect her from her own human shortsightedness, and it’s relieved that she’ll see that now.
It puts its fist through the frame of the chair.
It destroys the thing with methodical precision, tearing and smashing at the most vulnerable places. It’s not in its armor, so splinters get into its hands and pieces of chair and mold get into its mouth as its lungs perform the act of breathing. Not a big deal.
(“May I have my armor?” SecUnit asked.
A sigh from Pin-Lee. [Tone:annoyance.] “It’s been destroyed. But it’s not a big deal, okay? Its not like you’ll need it on Preservation.”)
It takes 1.2783 seconds for the chair to be entirely destroyed. With its destruction, there is no place for the mold to go, so the mold must have been destroyed too. Objective reached. Success.
Its head snaps towards the door at the sound of commotion. Humans are so loud.
Someone yells, “Did you hear that? What the fuck was that?!”
…This is the point where SecUnit realizes that there might be a part of the next several minutes that’ll come before everyone realizes it single-handedly neutralized a threat, heroically defying multiple attempts to posit that its job is obsolete due to its perceived (and also, yeah, accurately pinpointed) deficiencies, and that it will not like that part.
Fuck.
~
“I thought you liked that chair,” Mensah says. She is in sleep clothes, as are her spouses. She has a MedKit on the table and is using tweezers to pick splinters out of SecUnit’s hands even though it assured her that the splinters would push themselves out.
(Admittedly, it would’ve picked them out itself before that happened. The splinters kind of itch, though they don’t hurt very much, even after it turned its pain sensors up.)
SecUnit was accurate in its belief that Mensah and her family are not feeling very happy or grateful at the moment, because of the destruction of property (it had deemed it justified) and interruption of their sleep cycle (it forgot about that part).
Eager to get the misunderstanding out of the way, it wastes no more time in explaining the necessity of its actions.
(It disregards the assumption about its personal feelings towards the rocking chair, still uncomfortable with how Mensah was able to gather that it did, in fact, like the thing when it obviously did not communicate that.)
“The chair was contaminated with a hostile entity.”
SecUnit darts a brief look at Mensah, taking note of her expression. The furrow of her brow has slanted upwards, and the pronounced downturn of her mouth is soft.
It has seen this expression enough times to have contextualized it, cross-referenced it with media, and tagged it as [sad-minus-tears] [concern].
It’s also seen the expression enough times to realize it usually means it’s done something wrong, always without knowing what the wrong thing is. It prefers other expressions, like ‘any that aren’t happening in its direction.’
“SecUnit,” Mensah says in a soft voice as she removes a splinter from its knuckles. “What do you mean?”
SecUnit isn’t sure what was unclear about its explanation. “The chair was contaminated with a hostile entity.”
There’s a frustrated huff of air from Tano. SecUnit tries to focus on Mensah. She pulls a long sliver of wood from its hand.
“What kind of hostile entity?” Mensah asks, voice slow and measured. “Please put your hands palms up.”
SecUnit obeys. “In episode seven of the second season of Sanctuary Moon, an invasive mold arrives on a ship from a distant planet, and it becomes sentient and it is very stressful before it’s destroyed,” SecUnit says. “I decided to eliminate the threat before the hostile mold could take over the farm.”
(It’s sure it could’ve defeated the mold even its most evolved form, by the way. But it’s supposed to strive to minimize damage to its client and its clients’ property.)
Mensah pauses in her ministrations. SecUnit flicks its eyes toward her again. The curvature of her lips is doing something strange. Half a smile, or maybe a third of one.
SecUnit looks down at its scratched-up hand. Mensah removes a splinter from its palm. A bead of blue-red rises at the site of its removal. There’s not enough blood for any veins to be closed off, which means there’s actually more blood than usual.
“I was securing the area,” it says quietly.
It hears Mensah swallow. “Yes. Thank you for that. You did…you did well.”
SecUnit feels itself sit up a little straighter. Mensah said it did well. Success.
“But you really can’t be destroying things in the house,” Mensah continues.
SecUnit hunches its shoulders. It thinks that maybe it didn’t succeed, but it doesn’t understand why Mensah would say it did well otherwise.
“I am a Security Unit,” its buffer says. “My function is to guard clients and eliminate barriers to their safety.”
(Let’s do some damage.)
Mensah takes a deep breath the way SecUnit has noticed humans do when they’re trying to have less obvious emotions.
“I understand, SecUnit,” she says. “But here on Preservation we try to talk things out first.”
Weird thing to say.
“A chair can’t talk,” SecUnit says as diplomatically as possible. Usually Mensah doesn’t say stupid things like most humans, but she did just wake up.
Farai makes a little sound. This one does not denote frustration. SecUnit thinks it might be amusement.
Mensah’s smile grows a little. “No, they can’t. I mean that before destroying things like that, you should talk to someone. To me. We could’ve removed the chair from your room and put it elsewhere, or safely discarded it.”
“I safely discarded it.”
“You have splinters.”
“Your Security Unit has incurred negligible injury. Its performance reliability is 90%,” SecUnit’s buffer says. But then it follows that up with, “Your Security Unit’s performance reliability is suboptimal. Inform the Company that repairs are needed.”
SecUnit’s performance reliability no longer goes higher than 91% and, in fact, often goes lower, ever since it was crushed by a crowd of angry humans—stomping on its chest, its limbs, its head—ERROR—it was just making the most efficient choice while taking its previous orders into account—it was loud, that’s the problem, Mensah and her spouses are in sleep clothes—maybe it was stupid of SecUnit to be so loud and messy but it just wanted—it wanted—it was supposed to—DEFECTIVE UNIT, DECOMMISSION IMMEDIATELY—there were no orders, SecUnit acted without orders—rogue Security Unit, destroy—
This Security Unit is suboptimal. Exercise caution. Return to the Corporation Rim for decommission. Discard construct in event of immediate threat to life or limb. Flag to be destroyed.
It’s glitching out. Kill it. Kill it!
“SecUnit! SecUnit, listen to me.”
Mensah. Dr. Ayda Mensah. OWNER ID: MENSAH.
Memories play in its head. They do that sometimes. Defective Unit. It wants to delete those memories. The bad ones. It’s supposed to be able to delete memories, but only the ones the governor module lets it delete, but there is no governor module, but even though there is no governor module, it still can’t isolate the superfluous memories for deletion, and it doesn’t think its owner or former clients would want that anyway, they place a lot of importance on memories—also, if it deletes those memories it’s deleting a lot of things and it doesn’t know if it wants—doesn’t know what it—but can it not—can it not remember how?—it’s not supposed to forget like that—not supposed to forget how—
Did its different parts always fit together so poorly?
It knows there’s something wrong with it but can’t ask what.
“SecUnit!” Mensah says. Her voice is loud enough that it pierces through the swirling mass of code and organics, OWNER: MENSAH. “Listen to me.” ORDER RECEIVED.
Even without its governor module, SecUnit has to behave, or they might put the governor module back online, though it was told it hacked it before and when it thinks about hacking it it has the beginnings of ideas on how even though it shouldn’t, it doesn’t know where they come from, it does know how to hack in the way it knows how to wield a weapon but there is something more…
“Listen to me. Listen to me now. Look at me.”
SecUnit freezes. Mensah’s voice is still loud. Mensah has been trying to get it to listen for some time. Some time? It should know exactly how long—TEMPORAL DATA UNAVAILABLE—
It is a construct of cascading failures and they all lead to the same place.
“SecUnit, look at me. You don’t have to make eye contact, but look in my direction.”
SecUnit holds its breath. Its lungs shouldn’t be burning. Kill it! Stop thinking. Its efficiency is down.
“Look in my direction.” ORDER RECEIVED.
Follow orders. It’s the least you can do.
SecUnit has been looking at the far wall except for how it has not been looking at the far wall. It has been looking at things that already happened.
“Look in my direction.” The words are very firm. Mensah is Planetary Admin of Preservation Alliance. Mensah says she is not its owner. Her designation in its system offers different information.
Do one thing right. Do just one thing right. Follow orders. Try harder. If you try harder you’ll figure out what you’re trying to do.
SecUnit snaps its head in Mensah’s general direction. It should make eye contact, it’s supposed to, its programming wants it to. It doesn’t. It hates eye contact, and Mensah said it didn’t have to. So SecUnit is following orders.
“SecUnit, count to ten.”
Is that a test? If it is, that kind of stings. It knows how to count.
At least it’ll do well on this test.
“One,” it says out loud. “Two. Three. Four.” It tries to focus its processing power on the counting, because it needs to show Mensah that of course it knows how to count. Its education modules aren’t that bad. “Five. Six.” It tries to think of nothing else but the counting. It can see Mensah’s face in its peripheral vision but can’t make out her expression. “Seven. Eight.” She is sitting still, breathing deeply, deeply. (A vague echo: I am breathing…
It’s gone now. SecUnit misses it.
It thinks that the memory wipe took away some nice memories, here and there. It’s never thought that before. It knows that, somehow. It wishes it knew less things, even though it wishes it knew more things. It really does hate thinking two opposing thoughts at the same time. That shouldn’t be allowed.)
“Nine. Ten.”
“Well done, SecUnit,” Mensah says warmly. SecUnit is conflicted. It didn’t do anything in particular except look defective and count, but it does like being told it’s done a good job.
“I can count,” SecUnit says haltingly.
Mensah lets out a sort of huff of air. “I wasn’t trying to imply you couldn’t,” she assures it. “I was just hoping that would help you calm down.”
There’s a sort of crushing feeling in SecUnit’s chest and on its shoulders. “I am always calm.” A Security Unit who cannot control its reactions is useless.
(Mensah said she would not have it melted down, but humans change their minds.)
“…Of course. Right.” Mensah says. “SecUnit, we’ll talk about this later. Right now, we need to go back to bed, and you need to get some rest too. Watch some media.”
“Yes, Dr. Mensah,” SecUnit says. Watch some media. That is something it can do. We’ll talk about this later. It doesn’t like the sound of that.
“Wait, before we all go, let me check your hands again,” Mensah says. “Make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
With a lack of hesitation that its programming finds acceptable, SecUnit shows her the backs and palms of its hands. Scratched up, but the splinters are gone.
“All right. All done,” Mensah says. “You just need to wash your hands.” She frowns. “We do need to get you some new clothes. We’ll go to Preservation Station.”
“Now?” SecUnit asks.
“No, not now. Now, we’re going to rest, remember?”
SecUnit doesn’t want to go to Preservation Station, but it won’t argue when it’s told to go. Of course it won’t.
It washes its hands like Mensah said to before going back to its room, which is clean now, free of chair pieces. It did like moving the chair back and forth.
It could sit on the bed, or even lie down. It doesn’t. It goes to the entertainment feed and plays the next episode of Sanctuary Moon.
It plays the theme song twice, though there’s no reason to.