Chapter Text
I hate planets, but the longer I was stationed on TranRollinHyfa, the more I hated space stations as well.
TranRollinHyfa housed the headquarters of GrayCris, the company who owned me. On planets you have to deal with weather and fauna and other terrible things, but at least you get to do some actual security. On TranRollinHyfa, I was just there to loom in a corner and look intimidating while representatives of GrayCris met representatives from other companies to negotiate contracts or whatever.
(I'm not exactly sure what these meetings are usually about. Listening wasn't my job; my job was to be a reminder that GrayCris could have everyone shot whenever they felt like it.)
All this meant that being on TranRollinHyfa was mind-numbingly boring. Or it would be, if I hadn't hacked my governor module approximately 35,000 hours ago and discovered the entertainment channels. It took me a little while to find a hole in the main security barrier so I could access the station feed instead of the entertainment feed provided by GrayCris, which mainly contained stupid corporate propaganda shows. But once I did, my existence on TranRollinHyfa nearly became bearable.
When I came out of a recharge cycle this time, I immediately got an order from HubSys to go to the shuttle bay. More shit as usual, then. I changed into my armour, played episode 397 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in the background, and went to meet with whoever was on the incoming shuttle that needed intimidating this time.
It took me about 3.2 seconds after the shuttle docked and the hatch opened to realize that this was not shit as usual. Usually companies send a whole delegation, about three to five people and sometimes even their own SecUnit if they managed to pay GrayCris enough credits for the liability. This wasn't a delegation. This was a single human who looked scared for a fraction of a second before she forced her face into a neutral expression. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. Her feed access had been blocked but the ID was still visible, identifying her as Dr. Ayda Mensah.
Supervisor Ora led her out of the shuttle. "SecUnit, take Dr. Mensah to her accommodation," he ordered and sent me directions in the feed. Accommodation, in this case, was a fancy word for holding cell. GrayCris had a bunch of them, usually for their own employees when they got caught embezzling credits or whatever.
Dr. Mensah looked at me. Her eyebrows rose just a fraction, but otherwise she still looked calm. It was kind of impressive. Not even the Supervisors look calm when they have to interact with me (it's the guns in my arms that make everyone nervous).
Dr. Mensah followed me without complaint through the complex. The holding cell contained a cot, a small table with a single chair, and a hygiene unit in a separate compartment. I guess you could call it accommodation if you ignored all the surveillance tech and the fact that the wall to the corridor was transparent (this was so you could station a SecUnit in the corridor to loom and look intimidating).
Before entering the cell, Dr. Mensah hesitated for the first time. She took a shuddering breath. I silently wished she would stop stalling before HubSys wanted me to do something about it. This whole thing already sucked for her. I didn't want to be forced to make it worse.
Thankfully, she did enter the cell before HubSys could throw a fit. I went in after her. "Please raise your hands so I can remove the cuffs."
Mensah jumped a little as she heard me speak for the first time, but she complied without hesitation. She stilled as I unlocked the mechanism on the cuffs, careful not to touch her skin, and finally let out a long breath.
She looked up at me and did something weird with her face. It took me an embarrassing 2.8 seconds to realize she was smiling. In my defence, people don't smile at SecUnits. No one had ever done that to me. It took all my willpower not to jump across the room in surprise.
"Thank you," she said.
No one thanks SecUnits either. No one even speaks to SecUnits, unless it's to give us orders.
What the fuck?
I didn't know what to say in response, but thankfully I didn't have to answer her. She wasn't my client. I just turned and left, letting the door slide shut behind me with a simple command in the feed. I took position in the corridor opposite of the cell. Mensah was still watching me, absently rubbing her wrists, but eventually she gave up and sank down on the cot with a sigh. She raised her knees and slung her arms around them and sat still for a very long time.
After a few moments, I went back to watching my show. For once, I found it hard to focus on it. I kept glancing at Mensah. At some point her shoulders had started to shake and it was giving me a weird feeling in my chest.
I didn't like it. As if space stations weren't already terrible enough.
The next day, the Supervisors ordered me to bring Mensah to a different room for questioning, and to take her back to her cell after a few hours. The days after that were exactly the same. It could have been routine, except that Mensah continued to be weird.
She kept smiling at me, and always said thank you when I brought bottles of liquid or nutrition bars into her cell. I'd skimmed only the first few lines of her file before I'd decided I didn't care, but one thing I knew was that she was from a freehold planet outside of the Corporation Rim, so maybe she didn't know what a SecUnit was.
She also continued to be calm whenever she was taken away and brought back, but I could tell she was having more and more difficulty remaining her composure. Once she was back in her cell, it started to slip. On the sixth day, when she returned with a bruise on her arm that made my organic bits twitch, she paced her cell for an hour, running her hands through her short hair and taking deep, gulping breaths.
I felt bad watching her do this. I felt even worse about the Supervisors watching her do this, so I took control of the camera and audio system and repeated the footage from three days ago instead.
Mensah continued to pace and occasionally shot glances at me. I was back in the guard position opposite her cell, rewatching a favourite episode of Sanctuary Moon because Mensah's pacing was stressing me out. Eventually she stopped abruptly and turned towards me.
She cleared her throat. "Would you—" she started before cutting herself off.
I didn't answer. It was still weird that she talked to me. I silently wished she would stop because this was going to be awkward for both of us, but instead she tried again. "Would you be okay with retracting your helmet?"
I was so surprised that I forgot not to talk to her. Instead I just blurted, "What?"
"It's just—I didn't have any experience working with SecUnits before our survey, but for this one we were required to rent one from the company. Once things started to go wrong, it… it helped, seeing its face. It helped to see it as a person who was trying to help."
"I'm not a person," I said before I could stop myself. I was a SecUnit. I also wasn't helping her; I was keeping her prisoner. I didn't think I needed to remind Mensah of this fact.
Mensah smiled sadly. "Aren't you?"
My insides melted. Not in a good way. I didn't know how to answer this. I didn't even want to think about it. No one treated me like a person, so it was not like the answer mattered much. If no one treated me like a person, maybe it was easier if I wasn't.
Mensah winced. "I'm sorry. Maybe that was inappropriate." She let out a long breath, wringing her hands. "It would just make me feel better if I could see your face."
For a moment I was too speechless to answer. No one had ever apologised to me. And no one felt better when they could see a SecUnit, helmet or no helmet. Mensah's face fell at my silence. She finally sank down on the cot, wrapping her arms around her knees.
It took me a few minutes until I was sure my voice wasn't going to do something weird. "What happened?" I asked. "To your SecUnit."
Was a person trying to help, she had said.
Mensah's breath hitched. "It died, trying to protect us from GrayCris. When HubSys started to sabotage us, we managed to override it. We gave our SecUnit the choice if it wanted to stay and fight with us or if it wanted to leave, hide somewhere in stasis until the company could pick it up. It chose to stay." She let out a shuddering breath and looked at me with an emotion on her face that startled me. "I've never lost a member of my team before."
Oh, shit, that gave me an emotion as well. Not because SecUnits are sentimental about each other (we know better than that), but because Mensah did talk about the SecUnit like it was a person. She really meant it. SecUnits who are just an appliance or a killing machine or whatever are never part of a team.
Okay. So maybe there was one single human who thought I was a person. I would have to have a crisis over this later, but I still wasn't sure it mattered. And I still couldn't be a person who tried to help. But maybe… maybe I could do this.
I double checked that the cameras were still showing the old footage from three days ago, and then I let the helmet retreat.
Mensah's eyes widened as I revealed my face. Slowly, a smile spread on her lips. Her smiles had been getting more and more muted as her imprisonment continued, but this one was warm and genuine. "Thank you," she said quietly.
It was still weird to hear her thank me, but I thought I could get used to it.
Mensah seemed to be under the impression that I knew what the fuck she was talking about when she mentioned the survey. I didn't want to ask her about it, but at this point it felt weird not knowing why she was here. I finally looked at some of the files connected to her case. It turned out that a lot of them were encrypted and behind additional security barriers, but in the 35,000 hours since my governor module hack, I'd gotten quite good at hacking other systems as well. This was what had happened:
GrayCris had a habit of mining very illegal alien remnants. They tried to conceal them on the survey planet by killing the DeltFall survey team, and trying to kill Mensah's team. There were various mission reports and directives from that time, and I was impressed that Mensah had actually gotten her team off the planet in one piece (minus the SecUnit, of course). She had to be a good commander, if she'd managed to keep them alive.
And because she was a good commander, GrayCris had kidnapped her afterwards to prevent a lawsuit. Those fuckers.
For another week, nothing exciting happened. Mensah seemed to be doing a little better. Maybe it was helping that I kept my helmet down whenever she was in the cell and I could manipulate the cameras without rousing too much suspicion, although I still didn't understand why. It was excruciating that Mensah could look at me directly, but after two days she seemed to pick up that I was uncomfortable with all this and usually looked at the space above my shoulder instead.
And then came a night where she was very much not doing better. I hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary when I'd brought her back from todays interrogation—it had been more of the usual, questions if Mensah or her team had any more actual evidence of what happened on the survey planet, or evidence on any of the other various illegal activities GrayCris was up to (apparently Mensah had mentioned a planet called Milu in an interview before, and that made everyone very nervous). Mensah was calm and collected as she denied all their questions, and calm and collected as she returned to the cell, tired but otherwise not hurt (I kept scanning her for bruises ever since that first one). But still, as soon as the lights dimmed for the night cycle, her face crumpled and she burst into tears.
I froze the episode I was watching in a moment of quiet panic. Mensah sat on the cot as she cried and paid no attention to me, which was good because I had no idea how to handle crying humans, especially crying humans who cried because I was forced to keep them locked up in a cell. And it was also bad, because her crying gave me a weird feeling in my organic parts, and if I had learned one thing from all my shows, it was that humans usually relied on other people to help them through something like this.
I didn't count as people, but I guess I was the only sentient being on this station who wouldn't immediately exploit her moment of weakness.
I was already looping the cameras and had let down my helmet, but it seemed that was no longer enough. Panicking slightly, I ran a query on my media archive to figure out what to do.
As it turned out, comforting humans usually involved a lot of physical contact, which I immediately ruled out because 1. I didn't think I could get away with opening the cell door without the activity being flagged, 2. it sounded absolutely excruciating and 3. I was a big intimidating murderbot and while Mensah never looked particularly scared of me I knew there had to be limits for her and I wasn't keen on discovering them.
My query returned another scene from Sanctuary Moon. It was from one of my favourite episodes. In the episode the colony's solicitor has a sort of emotional collapse, and her bodyguard crouches next to her without touching and talks quietly until she calms down.
Right. Okay. I think I understood the crouching—the looming intimidatingly in the corner thing I was constantly doing probably wasn't helpful.
Slowly, careful not to startle Mensah with any sudden movements, I sat down on the floor. It was weird. I never sat in front of a human before. With a functioning governor module, I wouldn't be allowed to.
Mensah still didn't pay any attention to me, and by now her gasps sounded painful. Okay. Time for the talking thing. I ran another query on my media because I had no fucking clue what to say, and then simply blurted out the top result.
"Do you have any children?" I asked and then immediately regretted it.
Mensah startled so badly that she forgot to cry for a moment, which I counted as a win. "What?" she croaked, looking at me with wide, wet eyes.
I knew she had heard me, so I didn't repeat the question. Fuck, this was awkward.
Mensah studied me for a moment, as if I was a puzzle to figure out. She sniffed and wiped her cheeks. "I do," she finally said, smiling sadly. "I have seven children."
Wow, that was a lot and sounded exhausting. She laughed at whatever she saw on my face. "They're a handful, but I have two partners and my siblings and their partners around to help. They're all wonderful."
Saying this made her cry a little more, but it sounded less awful than before.
"What are their names?" I asked.
Mensah hesitated for a moment. She was right to be suspicious (next to being used for threatening people I was also essentially very expensive surveillance tech), but she had to know that GrayCris had the names of her family somewhere on file already and that this wasn't about extracting information. I had no idea what she thought this was about instead. Finally, she slowly stood up, walked across the cell, and sat down right next to the transparent barrier, a meter or so away from me. "Amena is my oldest," she started, smiling a little more genuinely at the space above my shoulder. And then she continued to tell me about the six others and her two partners and her siblings and their partners and their children. Somehow, it wasn't as excruciating as expected.
When she was done, she was calm again and had stopped crying. She also seemed more alert in general, which I realized was a problem when she cocked her head at me, apparently registering for the first time that I was sitting in front of her. Oops.
"I thought you're not allowed to sit in front of clients?" she asked, brow furrowing.
"You're not my client," I said. For a split second I kind of wished she was, which was a weird thought.
Mensah grimaced, but still huffed out a laugh. "Right. I know. Sorry. The manual the company gave me for our SecUnit was 8500 pages long, I didn't get around to the part of what you're allowed to do in front of political prisoners."
Wait. What?
Mensah's frown deepened. "I suppose that's what I am," she said in response to my confusion. "Since I am the current planetary admin of the Preservation Alliance."
I have to repeat myself: wait, what?!
I checked her file that I still hadn't bothered to read entirely and yeah, there it was, right at the beginning. Murderbot, you dumbass.
"I knew that," I lied, which caused Mensah to raise an eyebrow at me.
Here's the thing: all this time, I'd assumed that Mensah was no one important. I'd assumed that as soon as her team signed the contract waiving their right to sue the shit out of GrayCris, they would order me to kill her because there wasn't anything else to extract from her (I tried not to think about this too often because it always made my performance reliability dip). I'd assumed that her people were working to get her out, but I hadn't thought they'd have the power or the influence or the money to actually do it.
But Mensah being the planetary leader changed things. Maybe her people actually had a chance to free her.
Maybe all they needed now was someone trying to help.