Chapter Text
“Half of eight is four! Half of sixteen is eight! Half of fourteen is seven! Half of seven is, uh…what’s half of seven?”
“Half of seven is three-point-five,” SecUnit says.
“You’re right!” ID: NURU[mensah-child-7][resident:mensah-habitat][age:8] affirms, kicking a rock for no particular reason. The rock doesn’t go very far, but it does make three specimens of beaked fauna squawk very loudly. SecUnit peers over at the coop.
The fauna are unharmed.
Nuru is the littlest Mensah child and Mensah says they are discovering themself. She says this about all of her children, but especially Nuru. SecUnit doesn’t know what that means and doesn’t ask, even though Mensah says she likes when it asks questions.
Nuru is eight years old.
By the estimations of Dr. Gurathin, SecUnit—FORMER DESIGNATION: Security Unit 238776431—has physically existed for thirteen to fifteen years.
That’s young for a human, but SecUnit isn’t a human, and for a construct, that’s pretty old. Which makes sense. It’s an outdated model, deteriorated both in its organics and inorganics.
It wonders how many memory wipes it’s had, in thirteen to fifteen years. How much damage it took to get to the state it’s in.
Nuru is saying something, but SecUnit wasn’t paying attention. Nuru runs in front of it, which SecUnit does pay attention to. Nuru likes to run around and climb on things and jump off of things, which is both stressful and frustrating.
SecUnit thought it would be annoying when Nuru and sometimes their siblings started joining it on perimeter walks, and it is, but it’s also…good, in some way.
Mensah insists she doesn’t need its protection, but children need protection because they are children. So SecUnit can protect its owner by protecting her family, and specifically the members of her family who are squishy and not yet grown and even stupider than SecUnit.
“Return to your Security Unit’s side,” SecUnit says, and Nuru hops backwards and looks up at SecUnit with a smile. SecUnit only knows this because it glances down for .23 seconds.
Nuru’s smile is big and bright and shows a lot of their teeth and also the two gaps where there are no teeth, because humans lose their teeth in their youth. Then they get new teeth. (SecUnit realized this only recently. It was not a welcome realization.) The whole thing is messy and gross and SecUnit is grateful it never had to be a child.
ADD TO LIST: THINGS I AM GRATEFUL FOR
(Arada suggested it could make mental lists like that instead of just its running list of failures. She actually suggested scrapping the running list of failures entirely, but it decided to exercise its ability to make decisions and didn’t.)
“Can I hold onto your arm? If I don’t touch your skin?”
SecUnit holds its arm straight out and to the side. Nuru squeals, jumping up to grab onto it. Its arm is covered by a dark blue hooded sweater, so all it feels is a little pressure as Nuru swings their legs. They’re so small that their feet don’t even brush the ground.
SecUnit’s chest clenches a little at the sight.
In its feed: SecUnit, T-20 minutes until we go to Dr. Oliveira’s! That’s Ratthi. Mensah is busy today doing things that planetary leaders do (that apparently never require a SecUnit) and can’t take it, and it doesn’t want to go with just Gurathin.
It would go by itself, but last time it went out by itself it took it so long to get back to the farm that it didn’t actually get back to the farm on its own—Tano picked it up, looking [unhappy] and [tired]—which was embarrassing.
(“Something happened to my mapping,” SecUnit said forlornly, staring down at its bed. “I didn’t go the right way.”
Fucking moron.
“It’s all right, SecUnit,” Mensah told it.
You stupid, stupid piece of shit.)
Besides, a ground transport gets to the clinic faster, and anything that makes doctor’s appointments go by faster is a good thing. It’s told that this will be the last one for the pneumonia for a while, at least, if everything turns out well.
It would be nice if everything could turn out well. At least this little everything.
SecUnit, with Nuru still hanging off of its arm, turns and goes back in the direction of the house.
“Are we done checking the perimeter?” Nuru asks.
“We weren’t really checking,” SecUnit points out. “I was checking.” It was also watching Sanctuary Moon. Maybe mostly watching Sanctuary Moon, until Nuru ran over. But it checked the perimeter too, several times. It’s just that the perimeter was fine. It’s usually fine.
It’s good to walk, at least. The best it can do, sometimes. The closest it can get to being useful. Especially when children come along.
“Hey, I was there too!”
Annoying as they can be.
“You were there too,” SecUnit agrees.
“Are you going out?” Nuru asks. “You’ve been going out more. That’s good.”
“I’m going to the doctor,” SecUnit says. It tries to sound neutral about it.
“You go to the doctor a lot,” Nuru says. Maybe in sympathy. Mostly it reminds SecUnit that yes, it does go to the doctor a lot.
SecUnit doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I won’t go to the doctor anymore after today,” it says. Nuru lets go of its arm and drops back to the ground as they get to the house. “I’m done having pneumonia.”
“That’s good!” Nuru chirps. “It sounded like it hurt when you coughed.”
SecUnit feels a surge of embarrassment when it remembers humans heard it cough. So gross. “It didn’t,” it lies. “I’m going to my room.” It says this because people like to know where it is for some reason, though it’s always in the same places.
Nuru gives it a thumbs up and skips away. Nuru seems like a happy child.
SecUnit goes to its room. Five minutes until Ratthi is here.
Very quietly, it takes its drone off standby. Drone A skitters out from under the bed and then lurches upwards to hover next to SecUnit. When it closes its eyes, it can still see using the drone.
With the drone, it can keep an eye on things when it’s out, or see Mensah when she’s in meetings all day, or…
Or it could look at people. See their faces, recognize them without having to look into their eyes.
Things like that.
It acquired the drone last time it was on Preservation Station, when Mensah took it to Gurathin to check its proprioceptive programs after it got lost.
(The day it got lost, Farai asked if it could get to the doctor’s office by itself while she bartered for some fruits and vegetables. It said yes. Of course.
And then it went the wrong direction, and later that night it could hear Mensah and Farai arguing about it until it turned off its auditory processors and used subtitles to watch its serials.)
Anyway. It went to Preservation Station with Mensah to visit Gurathin, sitting quietly and obediently while Gurathin probed its inorganics and then reported that its proprioceptive processor was online and functional. Maybe, he said, it’s a problem in its organics.
SecUnit didn’t want to hear that, which was why they left Gurathin’s apartment immediately after. But then Mensah had to take a call, and she told SecUnit to please wait for just a few minutes while she took it, ducking into a hallway. SecUnit was going to follow her, but then it saw the drone, wandering uselessly through a hallway that already had a discreet camera. It was the only drone SecUnit had ever even seen in the hallways of the civilian habitations on Preservation Station.
SecUnit hacked the drone and paired with it immediately, coaxing it over so that it could put it on standby and shove it into one of the pockets of its cargo pants.
It fed some footage from the neighboring Hallway Camera C to Hallway Camera A, replacing the footage that would show the drone flying over to SecUnit, and it was only when it got back to the farm that it realized it didn’t know how to explain why it had a drone, which is why it’s under its bed while it figures out what to do. Mostly all it knows at this point is that it doesn’t want to give the drone back.
In the feed, Ratthi says, I’m here! The exclamation point makes it seem like he’s happy to see it, even though nothing is going to happen but a doctor’s appointment. Again.
SecUnit puts Drone A back under its bed and goes outside, getting into the passenger side of Ratthi’s ground vehicle. Gurathin is in the back because SecUnit’s legs are longer.
Ratthi says, “Seccy, how are you?“
“Going to the doctor,” SecUnit responds flatly.
Ratthi chuckles. “Fair enough. You look good.”
SecUnit doesn’t respond. It looks out the ground transport window. The sky is blue and cloudless. Experimentally, it thinks, That looks pretty.
~
Snap. “Ow, fuck!”
CLINIC: Licensed Medical Doctor E. Oliveira
MedSys Camera 3
Rewind 15s
ID: GURATHIN. “SecUnit, are you listening to me?” Fingers in front of SecUnit’s face. Snap. SecUnit bats Gurathin’s hand away.
Reflex. Force not calculated.
If SecUnit’s governor module was working now, it would’ve already applied a punishment for hitting a human, but its governor module isn’t working. Its governor module was deactivated. Gurathin deactivated its governor module. In the feed he kept saying, ‘I’m so fucking sorry for everything.’
“The hell, Gura?” someone says. SecUnit lifts up its head to see the face the sound came from, turning its attention away from Camera 3 to see who just spoke. ID: RATTHI. It leaves Camera 3 running in the background. Oliveira asked it to only hack up to two cameras in the clinic at a time because otherwise MedSys would get confused. SecUnit has only hacked one.
SecUnit takes a breath. It sounds thin, which it doesn’t like. It doesn’t want to get sick again. It holds its breath.
“Shit, I’m sorry, SecUnit, that was…thoughtless,” Gurathin admits, cradling his hand.
SecUnit peers at Gurathin’s hand. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” it says.
Gurathin sighs heavily. “You didn’t hurt me.” He shakes his hand out and then flexes it. “See?” He pushes the hand through his hair. He doesn’t wince. “I didn’t get any sleep last night. Probably explains why I did that.”
SecUnit looks down at its feet flat on the floor. If it propels itself forward very slightly it could be out the clinic door before the others even notice. It doesn’t know where it would go after that, though. “I didn’t sleep either,” it offers.
Gurathin huffs out a laugh. “Was that a joke?”
“Maybe,” SecUnit says, because it’s not sure.
“The doctor was talking to you,” Gurathin says.
SecUnit looks at Oliveira through the camera.
Oliveira says, “Congratulations, SecUnit, your lungs are free and clear of any lingering issues.”
SecUnit sighs in relief. “That’s good.”
“That’s great!” Ratthi says enthusiastically.
“You don’t need the inhaled antibiotics anymore. I do want you to keep the inhaler and spirometer, just in case.”
SecUnit won’t need them now, but it still says, “Copy.”
“Fantastic, thank you,” Oliveira says before sharing a look with Ratthi and Gurathin. It’s a look it still hasn’t been able to tag because it doesn’t know the name of it, but it knows it as a look people share sometimes when they’re about to tell it something. Specifically something they think it won’t like.
Oliveira sits on his spinning chair in front of the MedTable and leans forward a little bit while still staying a healthy distance away. He is trying to make himself seem nonthreatening. SecUnit doesn’t feel great about this. “So, SecUnit, I do want to talk to you about something. I think it’d be a good idea for you to make another appointment so I can check your organics and we can talk some more about the rest of your scans.”
“You already did that,” it points out, a little impatient, because if it hasn’t forgotten then it doesn’t see how Dr. Oliveira could have. It was a whole thing.
“I mostly did lung-related stuff, since you were sick. But you know how we agreed to do some other scans while you were already there? And last time we saw each other we talked about them a little with Mensah?”
“Yes,” SecUnit says, though it doesn’t.
“Well, there’s some things we can talk about regarding how to help you cope with the information we found in those scans, and I can check your non-lung organics.”
Scans. The construct techs shoved it into the repair cubicle for a while, scanned it, and then sent it to the Recycling Center. SecUnit is always remembering that: the point where the Company decided it was more trouble than it was worth.
To be fair, it doesn’t really have a lot of other things to remember, and when it comes to relevant life experiences, being such a failure that it was slated for destruction less than a cycle after being memory wiped is pretty notable.
But Mensah told it that it wouldn’t be destroyed, and she still hasn’t gone back on her word. Maybe she won’t. Oliveira told it that the scans were already done, and whatever was in them, SecUnit is still here.
Maybe when Mensah realizes that SecUnit is more trouble than it’s worth, she’ll just deactivate it. Turn its room to storage and go on with her life.
At least that won’t hurt.
(It’s a Security Unit, made to be hurt, and it can turn its pain sensors off without a governor module, so why does it care about pain so much?)
It’s looking around the room. Dirty bars encircling it. Humans watching it with flat gazes. Splash zone—
SecUnit feels a brush of cool metal against its hand. It stiffens. There’s a ping. A feed ID. Oliveira’s dumb MedBot Dindy is gently holding SecUnit’s fingers in its stupid little pincer hand. SecUnit doesn’t pull away. Dindy lets out some beepy little sounds. SecUnit accepts its offer of communication. Dindy bubbles in the feed, babbling its cheery sympathy.
EVERYTHING IS OKAY :-) YOU ARE ON PRESERVATION AND IT IS NICE. YOUR HUMANS ARE NICE AND SO IS MINE. EFRAIN WON’T HURT YOU DOESN’T BELIEVE IN IT NEVER HURT ME. FIXED ME
Except Dindy is clearly broken, with its limited uses and its incompetently repaired hand.
:-( STILL HERE STILL TRUCKING
What the fuck is trucking? And if your human is so nice, why did he never fix your arm?
It’s been bothering SecUnit since it saw this outdated bot rolling around with one arm delicate and six-fingered and the other a fucked up pincer only good for grabbing.
I DIDN’T WANT IT FIXED I LIKE THE PINCER IT IS BETTER FOR GRABBING. I CAN USE THE OTHER ARM FOR OTHER THINGS
Don’t you hate being defective?
I AM NOT DEFECTIVE. I JUST WAS NOT MADE TO EXIST RIGHT NOW BUT IT IS GOOD I DO. I DON’T HELP HOW I USED TO BUT I HELP STILL. NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING DIFFERENT
I don’t know what to do with any of this.
FIND OUT :-) YOU WILL BE OKAY SECUNIT YOU ARE ALIVE AND YOUR HUMANS LOVE YOU AND YOU ARE LEARNING
Ugh.
HAHAHAHA. I WANT YOU TO COME BACK I LIKE TO TALK TO OTHER BOTS. THE HUMANS ARE TALKING THOUGH AND IT’S GOOD TO HEAR IF THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT YOU
Dindy quiets down, tightening its grip slightly on SecUnit’s fingers. SecUnit’s mind is clearer.
It’s on Preservation. It’s in the clinic.
At the moment no one is talking about what a piece of shit it is and how it should be melted down.
Instead, Ratthi is saying, “You know, maybe we can circle back to this.”
“I’ll do it,” SecUnit says, almost at the same time. The governor module doesn’t punish it for interrupting, but it would have.
Oliveira, Ratthi, and Gurathin fall quiet. Dindy is still holding SecUnit’s hand. SecUnit studies its grabby pincer and thinks it really doesn’t look very practical.
“I’ll go to the doctor,” SecUnit says again, in case their subpar human and augmented human hearing and processing power didn’t catch what it said. “I’ll go. Another time.”
“Yeah, of course,” Oliveira says. “I’ll call Dr. Mensah and she’ll consult with you to make the appointment. Does that sound okay?”
“Yes. It sounds okay.” It doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. Doesn’t want to talk at all. It doesn’t want to be at the doctor’s. It wants to look at its drone and watch Sanctuary Moon.
I am breathing the crystal air, it tells itself. That’s from episode 19 of season seven of Sanctuary Moon. It’s a great episode. Soothing. When SecUnit watched it, something happened. For the first time, it had the feeling it had seen the episode before. It didn’t say anything then and doesn’t say anything now.
It wants to go somewhere else, not disappoint the humans and augmented humans with its limited recollections.
It stands from the MedTable. “We can go now,” it says.
Ratthi laughs. “Yeah, buddy, we can go now. I just—look, please, please, I need to stop by the mall for a minute because Mensah—”
“What?” SecUnit asks. “Why? The mall is on Preservation Station. You can take me back to the farm first. It’ll only add forty minutes to your commute.”
There is an uncomfortable silence.
Uh-oh.
“SecUnit, this is Dr. Oliveira’s Preservation Station clinic, remember?” Ratthi says. “He works here once a week.”
SecUnit’s chest tightens. Even as it stumbles through its memory banks, it finds itcan’t remember a single thing about a clinic on Preservation Station, though when it compares the room it’s in now to the other clinic room that it has in its memory banks, they don’t match.
There’s no way it didn’t notice that.
But it doesn’t remember going to Preservation Station in the first place, only getting out of Ratthi’s ground transport.
“Right,” it says faintly, rummaging through its own data. There’s a recent deletion in its memory banks, forty-five minutes and thirteen seconds that it doesn’t recall isolating or trashing. INITIALIZE RECALL REBOOT. PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 70%.
“Yeah, actually, you’re right, never mind the mall, let’s get you back home,” Ratthi says.
“No!” SecUnit says, loud enough that Ratthi startles. “No, you have an errand for Mensah. I’ll bring it back. Whatever you’re getting. I can take it to her. Securely. I can do that.”
“We know you can,” Gurathin says. “Okay, let’s go. See you later, Dr. Oliveira.”
“Bye bye, Dindy!” Ratthi chimes in.
Dindy chirps in response.
Preservation Station’s feed unravels into SecUnit’s mind with ease as it steps out of the clinic. It’s been nominally on Preservation Station’s feed this whole time. This doesn’t usually happen to it. Right?
“That was my first time at Dr. Oliveira’s Preservation Station clinic,” SecUnit says, trailing behind Gurathin, scanning the area for threats, processing the scans. Its risk and threat assessment are both largely unconcerned about the area.
There is no response to its statement, so it rewinds its internal camera and sees Gurathin say, “Yeah, that was the first time.”
Okay. That’s something. It saves this new information about Dr. Oliveira in its PreservationExistence file under his name, but an ERROR:QUERY:DUPLICATE-INFO? along with a pop-up from PreservationExistence TAGGED: [maps-and-locations] makes it mentally pause before a surge of gross dripping heat covers its body.
Fucking stupid idiot, you already had the information. You could’ve just checked the fucking files. You could’ve checked the locations. What are you doing if you’re not checking your files? Stupid, useless, you’ll probably get everyone killed, and they don’t even need you.
DELETE-REDUNDANT-INFO: Y/N/REPLACE
Y
SecUnit shoves away everything else and throws its processing power back into the cameras, into securing Preservation Station and its former clients.
Its risk and threat assessment tell it that it doesn’t have to be on high alert, and its own data and memory banks and the files it’s now clumsily rifling through corroborate their conclusions as highly likely in this environment, but it can’t let its guard down completely. Not when it’s already useless.
It turns on episode 19 of season seven of Sanctuary Moon, half-watching it and half-scanning for threats and, further in the background, setting up Preservation Station’s camera feeds and connecting them to the now-sometimes-glitchy program that can consciously alert it to security threats in deep-background visual data.
Mensah must have asked Ratthi to pick up a new green sweater for Akinde, since his got torn up at school the other day, because Ratthi finds a sweater in Akinde’s size (unusually tall for an eleven-year-old) and trades some jewelry for it.
Then it’s time for SecUnit and Ratthi to go and for Gurathin to get back to his Station habitat, and SecUnit starts walking away before Ratthi is even done saying goodbye to Gurathin.
It needs to get out of Preservation Station. It knows it’s only been at the mall for, according to its temporal calculations, fifteen minutes, but it feels much longer.
There are a lot of humans staring at it today.
SecUnit wishes it was smaller. Ratthi’s height or shorter. It wishes it could disappear. It knows it isn’t in the public station feed. It wonders how many people know what it is anyway.
Back in Ratthi’s ground transport, SecUnit presses its forehead against the window and watches the sky and the clouds and the people on the street until it’s finally back at the farm, where it has been staying for most of its recorded history.
Ratthi hands it the sweater. “I’d say hello to Mensah and the others, but I’ve got to get back home, so say hello for me, okay?”
“Okay,” SecUnit agrees.
“You did really well today, Seccy,” Ratthi says warmly.
SecUnit isolates those words into a separate recording and tucks it away as it gets out of the ground transport and closes the door, walking to the homestead and slipping inside. Threat assessment and risk assessment give it the all clear as it identifies the people in the living room: Farai, Nuru, ID: KIRA[mensah-child-4/5][resident:mensah-habitat][age:12], and ID: YAO[mensah-child-4/5][resident:mensah-habitat][age:12].
“Hey, SecUnit, how was your appointment?” Farai asks.
“It happened,” SecUnit says, dropping the sweater in Farai’s lap as it makes its way to its room. “Ratthi got the sweater Mensah asked for. He says hello.”
It takes it 2.35 seconds to reach its room and close the door behind it.
It takes its drone off standby and backs up its maps and locations tags. Maybe if SecUnit can ever let Drone A out from under the bed, Drone A can give it directions and SecUnit won’t have to depend on humans who might might argue about it later.
SecUnit sits down on the floor with its back against the door. (It’s started sitting down when it’s alone sometimes.) It directs Drone A to land on its shoulder.
SecUnit turns on Sanctuary Moon. This time, it doesn’t pay attention to anything else. It only thinks about the serial, and for a while it feels okay.