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After the seventh time Dr. Mensah had asked me to go to a place with her, and then had to leave because she was tired, I decided I would monitor her calendar of activities more closely. Something was bothering her, and that bothered me. It made me want to stand closer to her and make direct eye contact at people who spoke to her so that they would go away. (She asked me to stop doing that).
Mensah didn’t ask me to go with her this time, but I knew she wanted me to. It was in the way her mouth closed tightly when the upcoming festival was discussed. I had looked into the festival, is was a calendar observation event that was only held on the local planet’s surface. It was going to be held in the same place as the Art Festival with the live performances, and Mensah’s family had organised for their camp house to be erected in the habitation area.
I didn’t have to go. My other humans, the ones from the survey team, would also be present at the calendar observation event and they were pretty competent at looking after each other. They would be able to look after Mensah, even if they didn’t know like I did that she had been avoiding her trauma treatments. If I could organise it, I would have Bharadwaj and Ratthi to be near her side the entire night as they were both pretty good at helping me when I felt things. They probably wouldn’t be by her side the whole time though, as it is some kind of celebration event and they both liked to join Pin-Lee in consuming intoxicants and meeting people. Ratthi especially would want to meet lots of different people. I could possibly organise a schedule for them to follow, with Arada to join Mensah when the others couldn’t keep her company, but then they might start asking questions on why I wanted someone with Mensah at all times. I could use the GrayCris assassin argument, but then they would want to know why I wasn’t present at all if there was an actual threat assessment present. They knew me too well.
It would probably be okay, the only weapon allowed on the planet that wasn’t for fauna control was myself, and Mensah would be surrounded by friends and family. I didn’t need to go down to the planet with her again and make things awkward with my presence.
But. I was still bothered by Mensah being bothered. So I showed up at the planet transit station and Mensah only blinked at me once in surprise before relaxing. I didn’t even need to tell her it was me, as I came to stand beside her. Farai and Tano also relaxed, and Farai even smiled at me. I felt less bothered as I had made the right decision and I was helping Mensah to also feel less bothered.
It had gotten dark as the transport shuttle brought us all closer to the planet landing zone, and I stood near one of the windows to look down at the surface. I could see all the lights that had been set up for the event. It looked different to when I had approached last time during a light part of the cycle. It made the planet look like a map of machine code from my files, little lines of lights that followed the temporary streets to make a visual map of the event. It sprawled out from the center of the event, a bit like lines and a bit like a spiral. It was pretty. I think Miki would have liked to see this. I made a copy of the visual, then marked patterns from the lights I found especially interesting. I sent it to Mensah, and she made an appreciative sound.
Under those lights there would be so many humans, constantly moving about in large and small groups. I felt uneasy for a moment, as I thought about being the only secunit present to monitor such a volatile event, before I reminded myself that intoxicated humans on Preservation tended to stay in loud, but happy emotional states. I wouldn’t be required to monitor everyone, I wasn’t being paid or ordered or asked to be here. I was here for Mensah.
After we departed the shuttle, the family group split in two and I sent a drone with the group that didn’t have Mensah. They were taking the travel bags to the campground, because humans needed lots of essential items and clothes when they went from one location to another. I was glad I didn’t have to pretend to be an augmented human here, I didn’t like having my movement restricted by a bag of unnecessary items.
Usually when a planet gets dark, the crowds of humans would thin out and get quieter. The calendar observation event was different. Everywhere was bright and noisy, with humans talking to each other or on their comms or their feeds or walking together between locations. There were the lighted sticks of multiple colours again, and I saw a couple of humans with glitter powder in their hair. In the distance I could hear the sound of poppers, and occasionally coloured light would flash across the sky. These were at infrequent amounts and I gathered they were being set off by enthusiastic individuals before they were meant to, as one of my drones had spread out and found a ranger scolding them about ‘environmental regulations’ and ‘the appropriate time’.
The closer we were to the pavilion, the louder and brighter it got. The pavilion was the central light source of the lines and spirals on the planet surface that I had observed earlier. I had to adjust my audio sensors to start filtering out background conversations, except for select key words like ‘help’ and ‘Mensah’ and ‘kill’, so that I could hear what Farai and Tano were saying to Mensah and the children that hadn’t yet wandered off unsupervised without a parental figure. (That worried me, but when I asked Tano they said it was okay as each child was paired up with designated buddy systems to avoid getting lost.) (That’s not what I was worried about, but I didn’t want to scare Tano with my kidnapping projections of how they could be used against Mensah.)
As the crowd gets denser, humans and augmented humans I don’t know started to brush against me accidentally as they walked past. I didn’t like that, and performance reliability slipped half a percent. So I moved to Mensah’s other side which placed me in the middle of her family group instead of on the outskirts. Farai threw me a startled glance and then a warm smile, as if she was actually happy that I was there.
Once firmly in the pavilion, we were located by Ratthi. He looked very happy and came over to talk to everyone. And he did talk to everyone, sometimes it was a smile and wave, or a clasp of hands, or a conversation about topics I didn’t care about. He looked surprised to see me, then politely looked over my shoulder. “It’s good to see you SecUnit. I didn’t think you would like this event.” He didn’t try to touch me and I felt warm.
“I don’t.” Then I changed my response to be human-appropriate when his face dropped. “It’s fine. I wanted to see it.” I lied.
You don’t have to stay with me if you don’t want to. Mensah sent to me. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t be able to see that she was subvocalising. She had been practising and gotten very good at it.
I want to be here. I told her. That wasn’t a lie, I wanted to be with Mensah and Mensah was here in the pavilion. I searched for more of a reason. The lights are pretty.
(That also wasn’t a lie, the lights and sparkles were pretty and seemed harmless.)
Later there will be a lot more lights, including a light show using drones and music. She explained to me. That was interesting, I had seen lots of live performances by humans but not one where they used drones. I also didn’t see anywhere that had a stage set up for me to assign drones to so that I could record the performance from assorted angles. Where will the drone show be? I asked.
Mensah pointed upwards. It will be in the sky. It will probably start soon, they do an early show for the children and then a bigger show for the adults.
I was reluctantly impressed that the humans would use the empty space above us for the performance. I sent out a number of drones to watching positions around the event, and told them to wait and record passively until the light drone performance started.
While we waited, more of my survey humans showed up and mingled in the area with the family group. I hadn’t seen all of them together in one spot like this since they had bought me (and Mensah’s family hadn’t been present for that) or when I was recovering from my memory crash (but they had only shown up physically in groups of two when that had happened). It was helpful to have them all in one spot to look after if an assassin did happen.
Then the first performance with the drones happened. It was above our heads and sprawled across the sky. On the speakers, music played from children media and the drones used their coloured lights to make the shapes of characters and popular scenes. I calculated that there had to be thousands of drones, and that they must be running off a pre-determined movement plan to create this performance as even a secunit would struggle to manage that amount of drones so precisely. I saved recordings from assorted angles to send to Mensah’s children and extended family’s children, as it seemed like something that they would like to see again.
It was quiet for a bit, as some humans dispersed to take children back to the campgrounds, and other intoxicated and loud humans started to show up.
It was getting quite close to the middle of the night cycle, and the start of the calendar observation event, when the second performance happened. The drones rose into the sky again with their lights activated to make a range of different shapes in the sky. They moved around each other and toggled their lights on and off. It was a slow and purposeless movement, there was no music played over the speaks so the only sound was the ambient crowd noises that I had lowered and the soft murmuring between Mensah, Farai and Tano. (They were concerned about how Mensah would react to something later, but she said she was fine in her actually-fine voice.) It was fascinating, to see the way the drones could be used to do something so outside of their function. It had no purpose but to entertain, and they were entirely out of reach of the humans. I must have had 15 drones unassigned to humans and spread out across the event, and I had turned them all to the light display so I could watch them move. It was so large, despite being made of so many small drones, and it was beautiful. I stood there near the middle of the pavilion with my humans and stared upwards with my own eyes.
My emotions had bled through the feed, because Mensah asked, Are you enjoying this?
I sent her a copy of my combined visuals from my eyes and my drones and sent them to her.
That’s beautiful, thank you.
I think she felt my disappointment when the drones started to turn off their lights and descend to their launch-landing spots. Because she turned to me with a growing forehead wrinkle, “Oh. SecUnit, I forgot to warn you-”
Fire washed over the plateau as the beacon launched. It flooded all my drones, my inputs, my eyes. The sound was deafening even for my audio inputs. We were too close. I had to get Mensah out of there before GrayCris killed her. Before the beacon killed her. We were meant to be a few kilos away from the beacon, not launch it while we were under it and now it was too late. It was taking a long time for the fire to reach us, I had overclocked all my processing to reach for her.
I was aware in the background of my mind that there were more humans present than their should be. But mostly I registered the repeated thumps of the beacon exploding over and over as it launched into the sky.
Mensah’s face was tight, her eyes white as she lunged towards me. I couldn’t hear her over the launch of the beacon. I pulled her towards me and out of GrayCris’ arms, turning to present my back to them and their weapons. Her hands had come up to grab at my collar tightly as she said something. I curled my hand around her head to protect her from debris to make sure that even if I didn’t make it, that Mensah would.
I bolted, tried to pull her with me but then someone grabbed my arm. I went to shoot the target with my arm gun, but then my identification tag flagged them as Ratthi, who was meant to be on the hopper not at the beacon launch site. Had they ignored my plan? Now I had two humans to get out of the explosion. Then there were more humans, and they were yelling and grabbing on to me and Mensah. I was confused and getting frightened, because we needed to get out of the explosion. The fire was drowning all of my drone inputs and if I looked up I could see the beacon shooting into the sky and exploding into lots of little pieces. We had failed, the beacon hadn’t launched and now my humans would die if I didn’t get them to a safe space.
Mensah grabbed my hand and I held it back tightly. Now she was the one trying to get me to move. Something was wrong with my internal mapping, as I didn’t know which direction she was pushing me in. Then there was another explosion (when would the beacon stop exploding? How long until the heat of the fire hit us and burnt my humans to a crisp?) and she jumped forward into my jacket and buried her head until mine. Her hands tightened around mine.
Then Farai was there, and I was so confused by the corruption in my identification tags that I moved in the direction I was shoved in. Then Ratthi and Tano were there and pushing GrayCris targets out of the way. It made no sense, they weren’t here at the beacon. Why would GrayCris let us escape like this? Did we outnumber them? Had I been damaged?
We moved away from the beacon explosion, Mensah and I bracketed between a small crowd of humans. Little lights from it flashed everywhere but we made good time, as the heat didn’t reach us and the explosions in my drone inputs started to slow down. Arada had left the hopper too, and grabbed a handful of my jacket to pull me towards a ground vehicle. I didn’t remember GrayCris having a ground vehicle but we needed to escape.
It was getting dark and quiet. The air smelt like smoke and Mensah trembled in my arms. I increased my body temperature for her. She didn’t say anything. Someone next to us was whispering to someone else. I recalled all my drones from the explosion, now that it had stopped, except for the ones that I had assigned to Mensah’s family and my other humans. Most of them were with me, in this land vehicle, or the one behind us. The others had also started to travel in our direction.
I wasn’t sure what do to. Mensah was acting like I had saved her from certain death, and I felt like I had just saved her from certain death. But all the other humans around us weren’t acting like that. They didn’t seem to be happy and relaxed either, but were instead tense and unhappy. That made me tense and unhappy.
We were hustled into the family camp house and I realised I had lost time. I searched for something to say, but my wires got crossed because what came out was, ““This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended-”
“No.” Mensah cut me off, urgently. “We’re not there.”
We were sitting in the lounge in the family camp house, opposite the big display screen. She wasn’t in my arms anymore, but her hand was still tight around mine. Farai and Tano were leaning over her, and she was talking to them. “I’m okay, I’m okay. I just forgot for a moment where I was.”
I played back my logs. Oh. Right. I had panicked which had made Mensah panic and everyone else panic. After I had joined her unasked to travel down to this planet to prevent her from panicking.
It seemed appropriate, so I leaned back deeper into the padded couch and covered my face with my spare hand.
“Oh hey, SecUnit.” Ratthi’s voice was next to me and I made a groaning noise. It was a harder noise to make than expected.
“How are you feeling?” That was a question I didn’t answer while the stress hormones finished cycling out of my system.
I had to lie. “Fine.”
Ratthi definitely knew I had lied, but he didn’t press me on it even as Mensah squeezed my hand again. She didn’t say anything either.
“I’m feeling tired. The rest of you should go back and enjoy the event. SecUnit and I will be okay here.” She said, sounding calm and normal.
No-one was fooled about Mensah admitting she was tired. She hated to admit when she was tired, but she would do it if it meant people would stop looking at me. At us. But they still nodded liked they believed her and wished us well. Mensah asked if they could leave the light off. (I didn’t need the light, but humans usually did. She must be really bothered and this time I knew I was the reason.)
Then it was quiet and we sat there together. I could hear the distant sound of further explosions, but I couldn’t see it with my eyes on any remote inputs. My drones had started to enter through the open window and circled our heads in a holding pattern. I should say something but I didn’t know what to say. I did what I did last time we were both anxious and sitting on a surface facing a display screen. I connected to it and started to play The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, episode 106, the soothing episode with the synchronised breathing bacteria.
Mensah chuckled next to me, then she took in a deep breath and pressed her hands over her face for a long time. “Can you cut to the breathing moment?” She asked.
I chopped the episode into a looping take of Flight Supervisor Kogi mourning his adoptive parents short life-cycle. Mensah starts to breathe along with the screen and despite my chemical flush being mostly done by then, I joined her. I couldn’t ignore it, it was soothing.
Mensah’s grip on my hand loosened, but didn’t quite let go. So I loosened mine as well. Then I shifted myself to move a little closer to her, close enough that we still weren’t touching but that I could register her body heat. It felt a little like she was increasing her body temperature and applying emergency care to me.
I didn’t know what to say about what had happened next, but Mensah was thinking faster than I was. “I’m sorry, I handled that badly.” She said.
I still didn’t know how to respond to an apology. “I’m fine.” I avoided looking at her face with my drones. “I’m sorry I ruined your event.” I added on.
“You didn’t ruin it, I meant I’m sorry that I reacted like that.”
Acted like what? I frowned as I ran back through the recordings. Oh, she meant when she went from trying to stop me from having a malfunction to when she started having her own malfunction. Then all my humans and Mensah’s family humans got together to get us both out of there. I had nearly shot Ratthi before she also got confused about where we were. I didn't like that.
“I didn’t know I could malfunction like that.” I admitted to her.
Her voice was sad. “I didn’t know I would be like that either. So that makes two of us.”
“Have you started trauma treatment?” I asked it quickly.
Her head shook slowly. I appreciated that she didn’t lie to me like she did to the other humans.
“What about you? Have you considered getting a Retrieved Client Protocol?” Her voice had moved into an amused and more normal tone.
I imitated her head shake. “I am not a client. Or a human. It wouldn’t work on me.”
She made a considering noise and I felt caught. This was awkward and I needed to change the subject. “I liked the light show with the drones.”
Mensah made a noise of agreement. “I’m glad you liked them.”
I hesitated, but I had been wondering since the first light show. I toggled the lights on for my drones, and set them to circle in front of us. “They only have one colour.” I told her.
It wasn’t much, not yet, but I could patch a quick code to have them run in loops and make basic shapes together. For anything more fancy like the live performance, I would need the rest of my drones and I had only brought 25 with me (and 8 were still out assigned to assorted humans). I could even make some of them look like a light going up and turning into lots of little lights falling down. Like a beacon explosion, without the fire and risk of death.