Chapter Text
So, yes, I had already hacked the governor module by the time I was assigned to him. And yes, the stuff that happened right beforehand did make me strongly consider going on a general killing spree, you know, like SecUnits in media. Because, for this assignment, they modified me.
Specifically, the Company gave me sex parts.
More specifically, I woke up from the maintenance from last assignment (panicking internally, as always, that someone had tripped across the problems with the governor module) and instantly detected the new fleshy appendage dangling from my crotch. In addition, I also detected several new modules, with sub-modules, with headings like anatomy_sexual, behavior_sexual, penis_control (UGH), deviant_sexual (what the fuck was that one??), aftercare, and other horrible things.
I already had a basic briefing of the assignment installed. I was going to be a sort of bodyguard for one of their augmented agents, who had apparently been injured in a recent mission. An additional set of instructions informed me that there was some suspicion that he had brought the injury on himself, and that I was to prevent such behavior and report it to his handler, a man named Fylit.
They had me get dressed in human clothes, which was extremely weird, though at least there was a slim pseudo-armor to go underneath it. At least with the undergarments and the under-armor, I was able to strap down the dangling, jiggling new piece of hardware, so to speak.
They brought me into the room with the agent, Gurathin, and he turned to look at me, and with an amount of mockery and derision that even I could detect, said, “Hi, lover.”
“Don’t be that way, Gurathin,” said another Company manager, a woman. “This will allow you to engage in more of the high-risk, high-reward operations that you prefer.”
“It will be an obstacle,” said Gurathin. “It’s not trained for this. Pasting a penis on it doesn’t solve the underlying problem — that it can’t pass for human. It is a liability.”
Wow. Hello to you too, asshole.
I mean, he wasn’t wrong about the passing for human thing. I wasn’t interested in passing for human. I wasn’t a human. And I wasn’t a sexbot.
“We need you safe,” she said, with a pat to his shoulder that made him tense up like he was going to hit her. My threat assessment module poked me about it, but he didn’t. He just glared mutinously at me, because he couldn’t glare at her, and then we had to go leave on our mission.
Our mission. Ugh.
—
At first, we were trapped together in a passenger cabin heading to another space station. I didn’t know where, and didn’t care; I’d managed to download quite a bit of new media while on Port FreeCommerce, and I preoccupied myself with it.
Gurathin mostly ignored me. He queried specific security protocol over the feed once, and his emotions were furious but difficult to identify. They mostly seemed tilted towards anger, but there was plenty of fear, too, and behind that, a kind of fatigue that I couldn’t figure out.
I spent that first voyage watching media and deleting every module related to the sex part. Except for penis_control. When I deleted penis_control, it started twitching and doing weird things, and I realized it was taking input from other systems. Penis_control had to be extracted from recently deleted files and re-established.
Gurathing did give me a first draft of behavioral code to make me seem human. It randomized certain movements, like rubbing the nose, picking at nails, even smaller things like shifting weight or gesturing mid-sentence. I completely rewrote it from scratch. He noticed I wasn’t running his code and asked for it; I gave it to him just to show him how shitty his version was. He seemed to actually understand, because he just frowned over it and then didn’t say any more about it.
—
As a SecUnit, I normally wear armor. (Not on this mission, because this mission sucked.) A lot of humans make armor out of their attitude, holding themselves in a way that means hands-off, don’t-touch. I’ve never been able to do that without the actual armor to emphasize the point. Most humans have at least a little of this kind of armor. Gurathin did; he made it from lurking and glaring out from under a heavy brow, which made him look low-key evil. He had the right face for it. He could also do it with awkwardness, which honestly I admired, though I figured that all out later.
When we got to the next space station, it was the first time I saw Gurathin do something really weird and incomprehensible, that it turned out he did a lot.
He went into a bar and basically retracted his armor. Like now it was something underneath his skin, leaving him fully vulnerable. He did it with body language, something hunched in the spine and curved in the shoulders, with his head tilted a bit to the side, exposing the augment interface. It made my threat assessment module keep lurching every time someone so much as looked at him.
And actually a lot of people looked at him. Particularly, the nastiest looking people in there were looking at him.
He leaned forward and spoke lowly to the bartender. A hard currency stick exchanged hands. Then he took a spot in a booth, fidgeting, looking restless and unhappy. I thought this was a pretty stupid way to be a spy, and a pretty great way to get someone to target you.
A couple of people came and visited him at the booth. He turned each of them down, with scorn, but also with a little, jittering look of fear. Before an hour had passed, a really big guy came into the bar, looked around, and settled his gaze on Gurathin. He went straight over.
I noticed that Gurathin’s heavy, evil-looking brow could be changed completely when he held his face at a different angle, and at that angle, he looked younger, with large eyes.
Anyway, he latched on to this guy, followed him out. I sent him a ping asking for instructions, and noting that without instructions I would, you know, follow security protocol and maybe come kick that guy’s ass.
Gurathin sent: Don’t interfere. Otherwise, I don’t care.
So I was fully about to fuck off when I thought: is that what a SecUnit with a working governor module would do? No. No, it isn’t.
I pinned a drone on him and followed, according to stupid security protocol.
What I saw was him taken into a medium income living unit, one with trash around the door. The drone had to find a vent to get inside, but made it just in time to see him provide some little packets of powder to the occupants. He declined having any himself, but while they got high, he let them push alcohol on him.
It got boring for a while, and I watched Attack of the Meteor Murderer in the background. I paused it when threat and risk assessment both jumped, and ran back the footage to check: Oh. The big guy had grabbed Gurathin and dragged him into his lap. Gurathin had a flush on his cheeks, maybe from the alcohol; he was unsteady. His legs were splayed out to either side, and he was pressing his hips back against the guy’s crotch. He looked pretty out of it.
I had a connection to his onboard augments, and I reached out to them for status. His blood alcohol level was low — as it was supposed be. His augments were busy scrubbing every trace of it from his bloodstream, as fast as he drank it. He was faking drunk.
Risk assessment fell in response to that information.
Threat assessment did not.
The guy started working down Gurathin’s pants — right in front of four others in the same room. Gurathin was visibly uncomfortable with it, and their response was to feed him another shot. Threat assessment was basically jumping up and down and screaming now, as the guy peeled the shirt over Gurathin’s head.
I couldn’t help it: I pinged him. Security protocol requires intervention.
I saw him twitch on the drone footage in response to the ping. “Come on, sweetheart, hop on,” the big guy was saying. “Got a nice big cock for you.”
Do not intervene, Gurathin sent back. Status green.
Fucking liar. Status was not green.
And I didn’t care, so I could go back to watching media.
On the footage, Gurathin arched and sank back down in the big guy’s lap. A flicker of pain crossed his face.
“Now, that’s a nice, sweet little pussy,” the guy said —
Right, I might have forgotten to say. It became clear to me during that first passenger cabin voyage that Gurathin was in possession of male and female sex parts. Clearly some modification had been made. I didn’t want to know this and definitely didn’t inquire any further.
But this guy was mostly interested in the female sex part. It must have been the only one interested in him, because Gurathin’s male sex part didn’t look fully tumescent.
One of the other men in the room came over waving his sex part around and put it in Gurathin’s mouth. It was horrible. It blocked the camera’s view of Gurathin’s face. The only thing I could see to ascertain status was his hand, gone flat against that man’s hip.
(You might have noticed my mistake, by this point.)
This wasn’t any less disgusting than it would have been before I got my sex part, I was glad to learn. My sex part was not interested.
The big guy passed him — passed him, like he was a toy — over to one of his friends. Big guy’s sex part had gone floppy. This was when I got Gurathin’s network ping. It wasn’t a rescue-me ping. It was a download-this-please ping. And then he gave me backdoor access to the whole feed from the big guy’s place, which he must have been hacking while he pretended to be limp and intoxicated.
Grudgingly, I thought that was a pretty good trick. I thought it was even better when the feed got me into an absolute treasure trove of criminal activity. This guy was an absolute piece of shit, and he had engaged in various acts of being a piece of shit for hire, including intimidation, blackmail, assault — even one incredibly inept murder for hire which nonetheless had apparently been successful. The best part was, he was the kind of piece of shit who thought he was smarter than he was, and he kept communication records for all of it.
How did Gurathin know? Did he have a radar for the biggest piece of shit in the room? He’d laid himself out like a helpless fauna — I mean, a helpless fauna with drugs for sale — and this guy had come to him.
Later, he came creeping out of there, looking beyond exhausted. My drone waved in front of him, and he sighed, and followed it, without me having to tell him. I pinged him with a hotel reservation he would need to accept and authorize, and he did so fast I wasn’t sure he read it at all. I had already swept the room by the time he got there.
He didn’t say anything to me, just went straight into the bathroom, where I could hear the shower running a moment later.
And thus our pattern began.
—
He was good at what he did.
I guess that was what made it tolerable for me. I prefer humans who are competent and smart. He was competent. He was even maybe smart, but only when it came to data security. When it came to his own life, he was negligent.
But he was good. He didn’t always just make himself bait. He could put on a technician’s vest and practically become invisible to humans, poking around in various bits of machinery and installing nasty little malware packets. He had a real gift for systems analysis; he was always figuring out how things worked, whether they were people or machines.
We focused on individual targets usually for a couple of weeks at a time, sometimes up to a month. He would surveil. (Once he realized I was about a million times better than him at this, he brought me in on this stage, without argument. It felt like a victory, until I realized I had signed myself up for a lot of boring shit.) He would form at least three plans for extracting data, with each of those plans having at least one backup plan, and put everything into motion.
At his best, his plans had very slim chances of total failure. He would nest one plan inside another, so that if everything went well, he could get objective A, but if something went wrong, he’d still be left with access to objective B, and if it all turned into a shitshow, he could grab objective C and get clear. I admired his paranoia and obsessiveness, but really hated how that paranoia and obsessiveness didn’t extend to his own personal safety.
I called him negligent, above. Negligence is a failure to meet some duty or obligation to a standard of care. I could have said reckless; recklessness is engaging in active behavior without care. He was reckless when he put himself in danger. He was negligent all the time. He just had an indifference to his own life that was deeply troubling and indicative of long-running psychological problems. It was also annoying to me personally because I was supposed to make sure he was safe, and the governor module in theory was making me obedient to him.
Speaking of governor modules…
The company kept him on such a short leash. His handler, who I privately nicknamed Filth, would either come by or send little drone deliveries of things, patches and injections and inhalers. There would be extra whenever jobs were completed on swift timelines or got additional information. Whenever he received these, Gurathin’s hands would start to tremble and he would try to put it away and ignore it. But, soon enough —
“SecUnit, get a survey of outgoing ships.”
“SecUnit, go monitor this address.”
“SecUnit, make sure there’s no one watching the hotel.”
And, when he was really strained: “SecUnit, get out.”
“Where should I go?” I asked, when he told me that last one.
“I don’t care,” he would snarl at me. “Just get out.”
He didn’t want me to see him using drugs. Why did he care? The Company, presumably, would approve of his usage, since they were the source of said drugs. My surveillance wouldn’t be going anywhere but them.
And me.
Not that I wanted to see it.
I usually half-assed whatever he told me to do, because it was obviously just an excuse to get me out of the way. Once I didn’t do it at all. He didn’t even seem to notice; by the time I got back he usually just looked sick and tired.
So those were the little drugs. There was also one dose that he needed just about monthly, and this was a bigger deal; this involved meeting his handler in person or even going back to Port FreeCommerce. This usually took most of a day, while I went back to a cubicle for any needed repair or maintenance. I was done before him, and usually just had to wait around in the company’s embarkation center for him to signal or come get me. By the time he did, he usually still had wet hair from showering and looked dressed in fresh clothes.
His mood would be… volatile. He would seem happy, for once, but then he would get agitated or sad. He blamed it on me, for looking at him, for not looking at him, for failing at some task he hadn’t set — but he never sounded like he really believed it. I wanted to tell him he was an asshole, but instead, I’d just stare at the wall next to him, and he’d give up and stop. Sometimes instead of blame he’d just turn kind of frantic, overplanning, his hands shivering and darting back and forth nervously in the air.
After 77% of these monthly dose appointments, he would end up with one spare dose for himself. I honestly thought he was stealing them, and wondered how the company could lose track of so much of it. I was wrong.
It took me forever before I was able to sneak a drone in to see what happened during this. And when I did, I wished I hadn’t.
His handler — Filth, remember? — Was waiting for him. Filth was older than Gurathin, a light-skinned human with patches of grey hair and a stupid mustache.
“Gura,” he said, holding his arms out. Gurathin stepped up to meet him, and Filth kissed him on each cheek. Weird? Who does that? Filth took him by the shoulders, and that was when my drone, which had flitted to the ceiling, got a view of his face. Gurathin was doing that thing where he made his brow softer and his eyes bigger.
“Good to see you,” said Gurathin, in a voice that was low and, I’ll say it, husky. His pupils were dilated. Gurathin never said shit like this, so I checked his augments, which were still available to me for status.
Gurathin was a fucking liar. Again. It was not good to see this guy. He was teeming with adrenaline, and it was straight epinephrine. Gurathin was scared. I physically twitched, in my cubicle, as threat assessment hit the fucking roof. It then rebounded, confusedly, because technically Filth was also my client and was higher ranking than Gurathin.
“Good to see you.” And I had this feeling that Filth wasn’t lying, and he liked seeing Gurathin. Maybe liked seeing Gurathin afraid. “How’s that SecUnit working out?”
“Productivity is up,” Gurathin said. “You were right, it’s been good to have around.”
…what? If I could tell my drone to squint suspiciously, I would have.
But the reason Gurathin said that became clear. Filth looked smug. “You get it,” he said.
Gura nodded, just slightly. “You always do know what’s best.” It sounded vaguely sarcastic, but I guess the handler just ignored that. Or didn’t notice. Because his sex part was starting to bulge in his pants.
Honestly, what was with scumbags and their sex parts and Gurathin? He wasn’t exactly sexy, by human standards. He wasn’t symmetrical and polished. His nose was larger than ideal and his mouth was smaller. And yet, everywhere he went, sex parts.
“Sit down, and we’ll get started,” says the handler.
Gurathin went towards a chair, and the handler sort of clicked his tongue. “The bed, Gura.”
Gurathin peeled his jacket off, and the hoodie underneath. It left him in a long-sleeve shirt, mussed and wrinkled, as he hunched on the edge of the bed. The hander went to a safe, keyed in a complicated code and then some biometrics, and removed an injector.
All of Gurathin’s readings jumped. Anticipatory dopamine was trickling through his system. Epinephrine was still there, but norepinephrine was joining it. He wanted what was in that injector. He wanted it really fucking badly.
“Chin up,” said the handler, and Gurathin tipped his head up in Filth’s hands. Filth pressed the injector just under his chin, not quite in the right place to get it square on the artery, and there was a hiss as compressed gas forced the drug through the epidermis. He ran his fingers through Gurathin’s hair. I thought seriously about cutting those fingers off and feeding them to him. My governor module made warning noises.
Whatever it was, it hit fast. The adrenaline plunged and suddenly Gurathin’s system was absolutely jam packed with dopamine. On the feed, his eyes fluttered, and he made a little noise, and Filth said, “There you are… feeling good?”
Gurathin leaned his head against Filth’s stomach and moaned.
“Good boy.” He scratched through Gurathin’s scalp and Gurathin melted in his hands, mouth open. Completely pliant. This motherfucker nudged Gurathin back on the bed and had him stripped naked in moments. Like he’d done it before. Like he’d done it a lot before.
Filth stripped down too and sat back against the headboard, with his hand on his disgusting parts. “Come here, Gura,” he encouraged, and Gurathin crawled to him. Filth didn’t have to say anything else; Gurathin already had Filth’s sex part in his mouth, and seemed really enthusiastic about it. He kissed it and licked it and even swallowed it down with this tension in him like it was all he ever wanted and he couldn’t help but want more.
It almost looked like it was okay. Gurathin looked happy and wanting, and his handler treated him gently. He made Gurathin orgasm with his fingers before he put his sex part inside Gurathin’s sex part, and I realized I maybe hadn’t seen Gurathin actually reach orgasm before? That seemed like it must be incorrect, given the amount of sexual activity he took part in. Gurathin made noises like I’d never heard, and sometimes even begged for more, and he got everything he begged for.
But my memory buffer fed me the physiological indicators that Gurathin was terrified beforehand, and I knew it wasn’t okay.
It got even more not okay, though. I thought it was wrapping up, with his handler cleaning up his parts and Gurathin murmuring half-asleep, but then there was a chime at the door and the handler let some other guy in. Filth and the other guy kissed.
“Oh, he looks out of it,” said the other guy, giggling.
“He is,” Filth said, “you can do anything with him right now, he’ll like it.”
I don’t know what happened next. I deleted it and purged the deleted files. I also deleted any log I might have made of the contents.
Gurathin came back with an extra dose. I had this feeling I knew why.
—
He usually broke and used the second dose before two weeks were up. Always kicked me out of the hotel room.
Once, before I left, I blurted: “Security protocol requires that I not allow any potential hostiles entry while my client is under the influence of recreational substances. The presence of unapproved sexual partners is an unacceptable risk at that time.”
Gurathin froze. I froze.
We waited, across from each other, neither of us looking the right direction.
Gurathin unfroze first. “Why do you care?” he asked. It sounded tired. It sounded like a real question, which meant that I didn’t want to answer it.
“I don’t,” I told him.
He turned on me. “I was told to use you like a ComfortUnit,” he said. “I could start any time I want.”
It was the worst thing he’d ever said to me, and it made my processors tie in knots.
But then something happened. I don’t know what my face did, but it must have done something, and he saw it. I could see the brief flush of anger vanish. He went completely pale.
And, without making me leave, he went straight to the drug and injected it. He curled in a ball on the bed, dropping the injector on the floor, and hugged himself tight. His augments said there was enough dopamine in his system to make him forget everything bad he’d ever felt, but he stayed curled up like he was enduring something horrible for the next several hours.
He never threatened me like that again.
—
What if the governor module dispensed rewards instead of punishments? If that searing, inside-out pain instead was searing inside-out pleasure?
I don’t know what it would feel like. But I think I might still be a nice happy obedient little SecUnit, right up until the point I was torn apart.
—
It was so, so stupid. He was hurting himself the exact same way the company was hurting him, except he was doing it to himself without the excuse of the drugs. I just wanted him to stop.
He was getting something out of it, something complicated and inscrutable. I developed several theories, none of which fit all the facts.
1) He really liked sex. (He didn’t.)
2) He was re-enacting the abuse of his handler, with himself in more control. (But sometimes it seemed to be the point that he wasn’t in control.)
3) He was engaging in self-harming behavior. (But he did not seek the sexual partners with the highest violent risk levels; additionally, sometimes he would reject all potential partners if none presented parameters helpful for his mission.)
4) He had an uncontrollable desire for something that sex was an acceptable substitute for. I guess this would be intimacy of some kind.
Theories 2-4 combined seemed to be able to explain pretty much all of the encounters. This did not stop me from analyzing them endlessly.
(Do you see now? I still didn’t.)
—
I noticed every single time he decided to rely on me. It was happening with increased frequency as our association went on. He asked me for threat assessments sometimes (!!). He didn’t just send me drafts of programs, but would actually enter feedspace and make them with me.
I discovered that if I sat next to him on the hotel bed while he slept (some of these beds were big enough to land a hopper; we didn’t have to be touching) he experienced an immediate 41% drop in distressing dreams. I didn’t know what he thought about this. I never asked him about it.
—
So he got a little stabbed, once.
Just a little!
It was an attack in an isolated part of a planetary station. We’d had to stay an extra day unplanned because of a delay in departure, and this was long enough for someone to get on his trail.
It was four people that came after him, a professional team, driving him into a trap. I’d been following at a distance, suspecting that a threat might show up.
The first one who came after him got an extremely rude surprise when I punched her in the face hard enough to break her nose. The second dove for him with a knife, while the third got in between me and him.
Going through the third cost me .56 seconds, which is far, far too long. Gurathin got slashed across the lower back. He didn’t make a sound; he raised a gun and shot at the fourth, who was at the end of the hall. Who was aiming at me. He missed, but the gunner ducked back to dodge, and bought me time to take revenge for those .56 seconds. I ran at top speed to the gunner and as he poked his head out I slammed it into the wall hard enough to kind of explode it.
He wasn’t looking great. He was still standing but holding his lower back where there was a fair amount of blood oozing out between his fingers. “SecUnit,” he said, and he grabbed my arm when I got close.
I don’t like it when clients grab me, but he seemed like he needed it, so I let it go.
The cut was shallow and hopefully would not need a MedSystem. It seemed to have missed his spine, which was good, because spines have all kinds of important things in them. Above all, we needed to get on our ship and also get some bandages and wound sealant/disinfectant. I communicated this to him on the feed, and he pinged acknowledgment/approval.
My jacket was too big on him but not absurdly so, and it wouldn’t show the blood. I wrapped it around him and zipped it; he relented without complaint. He was pale.
The next several minutes were a rush for a kiosk, purchase of medical supplies, erasing the log of purchasing medical supplies, persuading the station computer to forgive and forget that I erased the log, and then hustling on board. We had a private cabin, as always, with two beds, as always.
He went to take the jacket off and flinched. I knew that flinch. I’d seen it on a dozen drone feeds.
“Let me,” I suggested.
He relented.
I carefully removed his jacket and then just as carefully ripped off his shirt, so he wouldn’t have to raise his hands — it was already sliced open anyway — and peeled the fabric away. It was bleeding again, gathering and dripping to the side.
I maneuvered him so he was laying on his stomach, and again he didn’t say a word. It was incongruous. He had a tendency to take out inconveniences on me, from a temperature a few degrees off to a program taking too long to upload or a choked hotel feed, but when it came to actual pain he had nothing to say.
No, wait, he did have something to say:
“Thank you,” he subvocalized, as he turned his head so it faced away from me. While I mopped up his blood, his blood that was coming out because I was .56 seconds too slow.
“My security response was inadequate.”
“It was adequate. I’m alive.”
That, Gurathin, was not the only criteria. Security is safety, not just life. Not that he cared.
I got the wound sealant sprayed on a little at a time, cleaning up a few centimeters then spraying. He stiffened a little at the first of it, and sighed, and didn’t get stiff again.
I was cleaning my gloves afterward and found that I wished I had just taken them off and used my bare hands. (In human blood?) If I was touching his skin, I would have felt what I now could tell from my connection to his augments: his adrenaline had crashed and his heartbeat went slow and he relaxed when I touched him.
Gurathin didn’t relax when he was touched. Not ever. But I could see it in the data: for a moment, I was the only thing in the world he wasn’t scared of.
—
SecUnits do get possessive over our clients. Possessive and protective. I’d never had just one client and never for this long. It could have been because of that.
—
In his report, he omitted that he was wounded, and he broke the seal on mine to edit mine too. No client injury, no review of my actions. In the company’s eyes, I’d behaved like a perfect SecUnit.
I didn’t understand why he did that, until later.
—
I haven’t really talked about it. The ComfortUnit thing.
Yeah, he and I worked on a code to make me seem more human. (I hated it.) But just as often, he would find an excuse for me to be a construct. He called me a ComfortUnit a lot in front of other people. Sometimes they were interested in trying me out. And he always, always found a way to say no.
It was really creative, actually. Everything from it’s all mine to sorry, it has a client in ten minutes. Sometimes you couldn’t afford it.
He even figured out ways to just have me be a SecUnit, and still be useful to the missions. I didn’t realize how hard he worked on this until I found a brainstorming sheet in his files marked for deletion. It had been accessed a number of times over the course of months, revised, reviewed. It was all about the basic purposes of a SecUnit and how those basic purposes could be integrated into his plans.
Even though it was marked for deletion, I saved a copy. I still have it.
And I did have a lot of time to watch media while he was dozing or analyzing or when we were traveling. Penis_control was proving adequate to its named task, and I could ignore it except when cleaning myself. Overall, it wasn’t the worst assignment I’ve ever had.
And finally, when we hit equilibrium, that was when it all changed.