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"SecUnit, are you sure you don't mind…" Mensah trailed off, reluctant to say the word babysitting.
"I'm sure," I nodded, as one of the assorted adolescents screamed. Comparing with my catalog of Mensah's adolescents' screams, this matched my sample of delight most closely.
Mensah's entire family, including her siblings and their marital partners, and their collective sixteen adolescents, were on Preservation Station. Some family member (after I'd vetted the guest list, I'd put all their names in long term storage and I couldn't be bothered to check who) was getting married on another planet in Preservation Alliance and they were all taking a shuttle there in the morning. The adults wanted to try a new restaurant on the station that didn't accommodate hordes of adolescents. ART and I were visiting my Preservation humans, so I'd offered to prevent the adolescents from accidently killing themselves or each other while the adults went out to eat, before they all spent the night on ART.
"Mom, you've left me alone with them before," Amena said. "SecUnit can handle it."
"That was an urgent situation and when I got back, there was a fire in the kitchen," Mensah argued.
I can assure you I will not allow the adolescents to set any fires, ART sent.
Sofi raced past, a pack of cousins and siblings trailing behind her across ART's recreation room. I returned her thumbs up.
"I've got this covered," I said firmly. "See you in a few hours."
--
Corporate espionage was not enough to keep ART's enormous processing power busy while on "supply hauls." ART confided in me that the extra zeros in the logs when it did the accounting correspond to digital currency it accumulated through a series of barely legal transactions while bored in dock. (ART got mad at me when I said it was gambling, but it was gambling). It had recently spent some of that currency on me.
"Peri, this can't be right," Tariq had said when we were docked at University of Mihira and Newtideland. "We have a delivery for a crate of intel drones."
"That is correct," ART said. "I do not make mistakes."
"That's too many drones." Tariq still tried to correct ART. Seth thought he'd give up eventually. "SecUnit, you can't possibly need all these drones."
I walked past him to see the delivery. There were several hundred boxes of drones, stacked into a cube. Back on Preservation, Mensah had gotten me a single box of intel drones that had almost lasted me through our time on Hell Plague Planet. Estimating generously, I hadn't gone through more than a box of drones a year the whole time I was enslaved by the bond company.
"I definitely need all these drones," I said.
Tariq must've pinged Seth because he came into the hanger and ART argued with them both.
"SecUnit experienced a trauma due to insufficient equipment. I am supporting it in its recovery by ensuring that does not happen again."
"Perihelion, you cannot justify misuse of crew funds as a medical intervention," Seth sighed.
After some experiments with Three, we'd agreed to return half the crate. ART and I were working to expand my capacity to utilize more drones simultaneously and steer the pathfinders, without causing my brain catastrophic injury. Thus, babysitting.
--
I tried and failed to get the humans to stop scrambling around the room. I was used to having the attention of people around me, either because I was a terrifying Murderbot or because they cared about my opinion and listened to me. I didn't want to scare the adolescents with a loud noise and they were ignoring my pings in the feed. I had no other ideas how to proceed. Amena had opted to stay on ART instead of attending dinner. She noticed me struggling and shouted, "Hey! Listen to SecUnit."
Amena was the oldest of all the cousins and seemed to have an authority that didn't require the threat of weapons. They got still and quiet, looking towards me. Only the youngest ones tried to make eye contact, the rest stared above my head.
"Here's the game," I said. "You try to get the flag." I gestured to the purple cloth tied to a pole, leaning against the wall behind me. "You can use these…" I didn't want to say weapons, "tools and we'll set up barricades to give you some cover."
"What are the teams?" a Sofi-sized boy asked.
"You are all on one team, I am on the other."
"That's not fair!"
Not fair? I couldn't exactly split myself in half.
"SecUnit can handle it," Sofi said confidently. "It could probably handle twice as many of us."
The boy looked at me, half impressed and half skeptical. "Even 'Mena's on our team?"
"If she wants to play." I looked at her.
"Oh yes," she cracked her knuckles. "Someone has to organize you all."
"What's the prize?" another adolescent asked.
I was stumped. There was no way they were getting past me so I hadn't bothered to consider one.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"You're fast, right?"
"Extremely."
"I want a ride on your back," they said, "while you run fast." There were excited noises of agreement
"SecUnit doesn't like being touched," Amena cut in.
"It's okay," I said. And it was. I didn't mind the adolescents touching me the way I did with older humans, and riding on my back was like rescuing clients. It wasn't like they were going to win anyway.
The adolescents ate some sandwiches as they tested the variety of balls, slingshots, noisemakers, and other repurposed toys ART and I had assembled. Spare boxes, wrestling mats, and foam boards were constructed into barricades at Amena's instruction, with the help of some of the older humans. ART and I agreed that the two smallest adolescents could not play safely. One was not yet walking and the other was inconsistent at best. ARTDrone brought them into a spare crew cabin. The infant was asleep and the other human was on the way there. Very small humans freaked me out, but ART seemed to enjoy tending to them. It was currently playing a song it told me Iris had enjoyed when she was small.
"Is everyone ready?" Amena called out to a chorus of affirmative cheers.
The humans had found something to paint their faces with, indicating they were preparing for battle.
"Ground rules," I said before the chatter could pick up again. "I won't hurt any of you, though I will move you away from the flag."
"We know!" one of the smaller humans shouted. "Mom says you only hurt bad guys."
"What about your drones?" Sofi said.
"What about them?"
"You said you were on a team by yourself. The drones are on your team too!"
I suppose that made sense to a human.
"The drones are like extra eyes for me. I control them."
"But you can use them to knock things out of our hands," Amena squeezed the air-filled ball she was holding, "or puncture these."
She had a point. "I'll only use the drones to see, not for anything physical. Unless it's to stop you from hurting yourselves."
A quick conference among the adolescents determined that this was fair parameters.
"Ready?" I asked. All nods. "Go!"
The first volleys of attacks were extremely predictable. One group of adolescents would make their way forward quietly, while the other drew attention. The sneaky group would make a run for it, and I would step away from the group pelting me with balls, to scoop up five or so adolescents and deposit them away from the flag. I didn't need more than a sentry drone for this.
Once this failed several times, they attacked me from all sides, with a single adolescent attempting to sneak past. This was trickier. I couldn't manage a drone for each of the humans simultaneously, so I had to rotate through each input to identify the adolescent making a break for it. They nearly got past me a few times. By nearly I mean I had to run to catch them instead of walking over.
After demands for sweet foods were met, the game resumed. I saw Amena and the oldest cousins with their heads together, pointing at the drones. The smaller adolescents ran around gathering the balls scattered through the recreation room and distributed them before retreating behind various barricades. I was shifting into position for another simultaneous attack when an adolescent yelled "NOW" and all my drones were pelted with balls. One of the humans hurled another at my face.
The impact of each ball wasn't enough to destroy the drones, but balls suddenly rushing at me in all my inputs and my eyes scrambled my perception a bit and I caught Mensah's youngest daughter a meter from the flag. She giggled triumphantly.
"We were close that time."
"Close," I said. I began working on code in background to account for similar attacks to me and my drones at the same time. I'd never considered that potential for neural confusion before.
They're smart little humans, ART sent.
They're Mensah's. Of course they are.
All out anarchy followed this most successful attack. Noisemakers went off, I was pelted with a variety of toys. This was far more challenging from the earlier strategic attacks, and was helping my processing ability expansion efforts. Accounting for the erratic movements of fourteen adolescents without using the energy weapons in my arms led to significant creative thinking. At one point I vaulted over the heads of three adolescents to slide three more across the ground as they squealed with delight, while knocking several balls launched by slingshot out of the air.
Even more challenging were the risks some of the adolescents took. Several climbed up the barricades for a better vantage point. I trashed a couple drones pushing the pointy end of a ball launcher out of the path of a falling human, and rolled in just in time to catch another before they landed head first.
Perhaps we should end the game, ART sent. Someone is going to-
Sofi screamed with pain. I had a release of adrenaline in my organic parts and dropped some inputs in my haste to find hers. I sprinted over to where she was collapsed, clutching her leg, her face buried in the mat, shrieking in pain. I slid through the crowd of cousins around her.
"What happened?" I said, turning her onto her back to check her leg as I went back in my drone recording to see how she'd hurt herself.
Immediately, I realized Sofi's behavior was not consistent with an injury. She had an arm flung over her face but no tears had escaped down her cheeks and she didn't wince when I pressed gently on her leg. I checked my inputs and Amena was walking towards me, flag in hand.
I was speechless.
How embarrassing for you, ART sent.
Fuck off, I replied.
"I believe we won," she said, handing it to me.
You have been paying attention in class, ART sent in the private connection we had with Amena. She beamed proudly.
"I've been practicing my acting," Sofi explained, hopping to her feet. "I want to be in a serial like Honor Princess Detective one day."
I sent her a thumbs up sigil of approval which she responded to with fifteen sparkling heart sigils.
"Alright, who's first?" I asked. A dozen hands shot up in response.
--
When Mensah and the adult humans returned several hours later, the adolescents were sleeping in a heap of limbs and bedding on the stacked pads in the corner. Honor Princess Detective played without sound on a display surface.
"You got them all to sleep?" Tano sounded impressed.
"Amena is awake with ARTDrone in the Argument Lounge."
"How did it go?" Mensah asked, taking in the mess across ART's recreation room.
"I believe it will be beneficial to my processing capability in combat with upwards of ten hostiles."
Farai snorted and Mensah's siblings exchanged confused looks. One adolescent extracted themselves from the pile of cousins and came to hold Mensah's hand.
"We rode on SecUnit's back," they said, sleepily.
"You… what?"
ART chose this time to share a video highlight reel with Mensah who laughed loud enough that the other adults shushed her.
"A successful first-time babysitting," Mensah said.
I nodded in agreement.