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My current surroundings were unfamiliar to me, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. I suspected that I had recently been subjected to an incomplete memory wipe performed by an incompetent technician, because I was missing a lot of files and memories related to my current assignment. The last assignment I could remember being on was a protective detail for a corporate team investigating new mineral resources. Given that I seemed to be in a habitat designed for long-term living, my circumstances had clearly changed.
It didn't make much difference to me that I couldn't remember the details of my current assignment. I had been on so many contracts guarding indentured laborers that my organics could probably do the job on their own.
The kitchen I was guarding was empty, which was lucky, since the last thing I needed right now was humans looking at me. I wasn't wearing armor, which was unusual, but the living space that I was occupying looked different than the run-down, impersonal spaces where corporate laborers usually lived. Maybe this corporation used nicer living spaces and moderately less terrifying SecUnits to ensnare workers into signing longer contracts. I wasn't too worried about it. (Yet.)
The space outside the windows was dark, and I could hear the quiet voices of many humans talking to each other echoing from down a narrow hallway. My governor module wasn't relaying any specific orders to me, so I stood up straight and held my arms behind my back, and stared directly at the wall across from me. Waiting was something I was very used to.
After ten minutes of waiting I began to get bored, which was annoying, since that boredom didn't at all relieve the anxiety that was eating at me from being stationed in a new area with unclear instructions. All I could do was stare at the wall opposite me, entirely focused, with no opportunity to even slip into standby mode like I could in a cubicle or transport crate. The tedium that had comprised the vast majority of my existence sank into my brain like an old friend. I didn't even have any data processing or surveillance tasks from HubSystem queued to keep my mind busy.
Time passed. Eventually, a juvenile human walked into the eating area. She flipped on the light switch, and flinched violently when she saw me standing across the room.
"SecUnit! There you are! I thought you had snuck out already."
This was such a nonsensical thing to say to a SecUnit that my buffer failed to muster up a suitable response, so I said nothing and continued staring over her head as though she hadn't spoken. It was not currently a mealtime, so she had no reason to be here, and hopefully she would leave quickly.
"I'm just here to grab a snack, don't mind me. Watching anything good?"
Was this human stupid? I was terrible at judging human ages, but she was definitely large enough that she should know that she wasn't allowed to consume more than her issued rations, and only during designated mealtimes. (That was why they often kept SecUnits in meal areas, to makes sure only the shift of workers assigned to eat an any time were doing so, and that they didn't steal extra rations. Because they tried to, frequently.) The casual way she was speaking to me pushed my threat assessment up a couple percentage points, and made the organics at the back of my neck prickle. Humans shouldn't talk to SecUnits like that.
"It is not currently a designated mealtime." I told her.
"Yeah, I know, but I'm still hungry. I'll be out of your hair in a minute." She reached towards one of the cupboards, but before she could open it I crossed the room in three steps and took hold of her arm. I repeated my warning.
The human didn't look afraid of me. She looked vaguely pissed off, which made no sense at all. I didn't think I had ever seen an indentured worker direct that sort of expression towards a SecUnit. Even if she somehow didn't know that what she was doing was wrong, she should definitely know to back down from a SecUnit telling her to stop. Instead of backing down, she looked me right in the eye and asked me what the hell I was doing.
"You need to return to your quarters for a rest period," I tried, hoping that redirecting her would do the trick.
"Yeah, I'm going to do that after I get my snack," the juvenile human said, and she reached into the cabinet with her free hand.
I was supposed to punish her. She was breaking the rules, and in order to keep the workforce in line, management needed to make sure that even the smallest infractions were met with retribution. Punishing infractions with physical injuries that required expensive MedSystem visits was just efficient economics. I was delaying as much as I could because I hated delivering that punishment, but with a governor module in my head I had even less freedom in this situation than the worker did.
I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to do this, but I was milliseconds away from a governor module punishment and then I would be forced to do it anyway, and this stupid juvenile human was refusing to back down, so in the end I didn't have a choice.
I squeezed my hand and twisted my arm slightly.
The juvenile human screamed and finally backed away as I let her go. She cradled her broken wrist to her chest, crying tears that were probably from pain, although soon enough she'd probably be crying from the amount of time that would be added to her contract to pay for the MedSys visit. The time she would spend—doing—what?
I remained in position as the first of the humans that had been alerted by the juvenile's screaming ran into the room. They didn't look at all how the workers on my previous contracts had looked like, but I didn't let any of my confusion show on my face. The aftermath of this wasn't my problem—the other humans would have to take her to the MedSystem and explain to the overseers what had happened. That part, at least, I was confident of.
Instead of ignoring me like the unavoidable background source of surveillance/punishment that workers always treated me as, the adult human that had run to the juvenile's side looked me directly in the face and said, "SecUnit, what the fuck?"
Instantly, my governor module activated.
Normally, governor module punishments last for a fraction of a second. The way I experience time, nothing more than that is needed to override my organic impulses and force the inorganic parts of me into compliance. Any longer than that and the humans would probably notice, and the company definitely didn't want its clients to notice how frequently their murderbots needed their brains fried in order to function properly.
My governor module activated, and stayed activated for—for one second, for two, for—
"SecUnit!" the human said again, and fuck, I knew this human, and something was very, very wrong here. There were more humans pushing into the room, it seemed like a flood of them, and I finally broke position and backed all the way against the cabinets, because the humans were getting closer and I was suddenly so afraid that one of them would try and touch me. I looked up and made eye contact with another human who had just run into the room, who was now standing next to the juvenile—who was standing next to Amena. She had short, light-colored hair that stood out against her dark brown skin, and the expression on her face was—
Another lightning bolt of pain from my governor module, which didn't feel at all like a normal punishment, but more like it was trying to fry all of my neural tissue in order to kill me, but failing for some reason. The pain stretched out into an eternity, dancing along every nerve ending in my body, but I couldn't scream, couldn't move, couldn't twitch. I was locked inside my own hardware and that hardware was burning itself into ashes, for several agonizing eternities.
—Until I slammed my head backwards into the cabinet as hard as I could, and the spell broke. My governor module stopped—but that couldn't be right, because my governor module was hacked, it was broken, it hadn't been able to punish me for over 41,000 hours. And I wasn't on an asteroid, preventing miners from stealing resources or rebelling. I was on Preservation, I was on a planet, I was in Dr. Mensah's kitchen.
My head had gone through the wooden cabinet door, and continued on to break some of the plates inside. Wood splinters scratched my ears and scalp as I slowly pulled my head forward. Something trickled down my neck.
The kitchen was empty now, even though I couldn't have been stuck in my own head for longer than a minute. There was only one human left, and she was standing straight, staring up into my face with a steely determination that had to be concealing the fear that any human feels when they're faced with a deadly weapon. Pin-Lee.
"Murderbot," she was saying, "Murderbot, I need you to focus. You are on Preservation, on Dr. Mensah's farm. Your governor module is inactive. You're safe, you're free. Murder—"
"I'm fine," I interrupted, before I had to hear her say my name again. I felt dizzy. "I'm fine, it's—where's Dr. Mensah?"
The look she gave me made me turn away, covering my face with my hands for good measure. I had lost all my drone inputs at some point and I didn't bother trying to get them back. I didn't want to look.
"She had to go look after Amena. SecUnit, I know you are going to freak out about this, and I am asking you to please try and not freak out about this. You need to tell me what happened."
"Fuck you, I'm not—" but I couldn't get the words all the way out. The reality of the situation was starting to hit, and I was definitely freaking out a little bit. I pushed my face into my hands a little harder and tried not to make any noise.
The look on Amena's face when I had snapped her frail human wrist in two with hardly any effort was burned into my memory and kept running at the forefront of my mind. The sound she had made, the expression of pure fear that I had seen in so many human faces, but never on one of my own human's faces. Not when they were looking at me.
Amena is never going to talk to me again, was the first conclusion I drew.
I need to get out of here, was the second.
"SecUnit!" Pin-Lee shouted after me, but I was already out the door.
Fuck fuck fuck I was screwed, I had fucking ruined the best thing that ever happened to me, I had ruined it and I didn't even know why. My neurons still felt like they were on fire. I instinctively started up a diagnostic, because something was obviously very fucking wrong with me, but I didn't have the processing power available to run it, so it cycled aimlessly several times before I could pull enough focus to shut it down.
Amena's screams were echoing through my head on endless repeat. I had done that to her, how could I have done that to her? She was my client, she was Mensah's daughter, she was my owner's daughter, and I hadn't recognized her, I had broken her arm like she was some indentured laborer on a backwater corporate asteroid.
When the company had owned me I had broken the arms of several indentured laborers. With a governor module in my head, I had had no other choice. I had also broken a lot of bones after I hacked my governor module. I did have a choice then. I could have chosen to expose what I was, and then get ripped apart, and then this never would have happened.
Rogue SecUnits were fucking dangerous, and I never should have come here. I knew that by coming to Preservation all I was doing was bringing corporate violence to a place that should have been safe, Amena should have been safe in her own home. She never could have been safe in her own home with a rogue murderbot there, invading her life.
They were going to dismantle me, I realized; they would be well within their rights to tear me apart. I was dangerous, I was untrustworthy, and there was something very wrong with me. I had betrayed the first person who had ever been kind to me. The only human crazy enough to see a rogue SecUnit and trust it, and fight for it. I had proven her wrong in the worst way possible. It was over, I knew that much. Of course, this being Preservation, maybe they wouldn't recycle me. I didn't know how the justice system worked here, but maybe they had prisons for people like me, who were too dangerous to be loose in society. Knowing Preservation, the prisons were probably pretty nice. Being recycled or being put in a cell for the world's most dangerous pet bot. I knew which one I would prefer.
I needed to get off this planet.
My stumbling path had only brought me to the end of the long driveway that led from the farm house to the main road when I calmed down enough to realize how pointless this all was.
I was trapped on the planet. The only way to get to the station was on the scheduled shuttle service, and there was no way I would be able to sneak on board with planetary security actively looking for me. There were no friendly research transports here who could change my appearance enough to fool the scanners. And even if there were, there wasn't a MedSystem in the universe that could hide me from scanners that were specifically watching for dangerous rogue SecUnits, like they all would be within the hour. My only option was to escape into the wilderness and watch media until my battery ran out. Which wasn't really an option at all.
I stood still at the end of the driveway, and had to wait a minute before Pin-Lee caught up to me, slightly out of breath (it was a long driveway). It was plenty of time for me to feel sure about my decision.
There was no way for me to get off this planet, and I wasn't going to sit in the woods until I broke down. That option had been available to me many times back when the company had still owned me, and I had never chosen it. At least I had gotten to experience freedom, if only for a little while. I had done things that I had never even dreamed I would be able to do when I was with the company. I had humans that I liked, and they had liked me in return, before I ruined it.
The only thing left for me to do was to find out what Preservation did with old secondhand murderbots that were too dangerous to be around.
"What the hell was that even for, you asshole? Needed some fresh air?" Pin-Lee was still catching her breath, so I turned towards the house and stared at the lights. You could barely see them from the end of the driveway.
"SecUnit. Do you think you could explain to me what happened without sprinting out of here?"
"I broke Amena's wrist."
She cleared her throat. "Yes, we all noticed that. I was wondering if could perhaps explain what caused you to do that, since historically speaking you're not one for breaking people's wrists at random."
I didn't know what I could tell her. I didn't even know why I had done it. "What happens to me now?" I asked instead.
Pin-Lee pinched the bridge of her nose like I was giving her a headache. "Well, Amena is going to be fine. She's on her way to the hospital now, and the MedSystem there will be able to fix her up in no time. So there's no lasting harm done." She sighed, loudly. "And I have to assume you didn't mean to hurt her?"
I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.
"Right. Well you'll have to talk about it with Amena, and Dr. Mensah. But we're not going to, fucking, kick you out of the system over an accident, SecUnit."
I clenched my jaw, hard, then said, "You aren't?"
"No, we aren't. But we are going to have to address what happened back there. And if you losing control of yourself like that is going to be a reoccurring problem, we're going to have to figure out a way to fix it."
"I didn't lose control of myself."
"So you meant to break Amena's wrist?"
"No!" I had to turn and look back at her. I made eye contact for two seconds before I had to look away. "No, I...I got...confused. Stuck. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know who she was."
She looked skeptical, or maybe worried. She was definitely making some sort of facial expression. "You...forgot where you were. Are you having problems with your memory storage or access?"
I wasn't. It was easy enough to check and I hadn't been able to find anything wrong with my hardware or ability to process memories, which made whatever had happened worse, because there wasn't actually any good reason for it. I didn't want to tell Pin-Lee that, so I said, "I don't know. I need to run some diagnostics."
"Okay. Will you come back to the house with me? We can wait for Dr. Mensah to get back."
"I don't want to be around humans right now."
"Everyone who doesn't live there should have cleared out by now. And we can sit on the front porch."
She didn't trust me to be unsupervised right now, which was sensible of her. I had already injured one human tonight. For lack of anything better to do, I turned and started walking back down the driveway, not turning to see if she followed me.
When we arrived at the house I sat down on the swinging porch chair that I liked, but didn't let it swing. Pin-Lee sat down on the opposite end of the porch and closed her eyes, which was not a smart thing to do when you're supposed to be making sure a rogue SecUnit doesn't hurt anyone else. Not that she would be able to stop me if I was inclined to. And it was late, for the humans. They would probably have started their rest periods by now if I hadn't—malfunctioned.
We sat there quietly for what felt like a very long time. I felt way too shitty to open any of my media, so I had nothing to distract myself with except for tracking the movements of tiny insect fauna around the dim garden lights. I still didn't have any drone inputs active. For some reason the idea of flying my drones right now was insurmountably difficult. It took everything I had to keep the inputs from my eyes in focus.
Eventually, Pin-Lee fell asleep, sprawled across the reclining porch chair. I didn't know how I felt about the fact that she could still bring herself to be so relaxed in my presence.
With my drones still offline, it was the sound of crunching gravel that alerted me as somebody approached the house. I kept my back straight and my gaze level as Dr. Mensah came into view, alone.
She smiled briefly when she saw me, but I didn't think it reached her eyes. She looked tired.
"Hello, SecUnit. Do you want to come on a walk with me?"
She didn't want me to be near her house. (Why would she?) I stepped off the porch, sparing one last look at Pin-Lee, who was still fast asleep and would probably be very sore in the morning from sleeping in such an uncomfortable place. I didn't wake her up to say goodbye.
Mensah led me down one of the trails that meandered through the farm. We passed through the widely spaced trees of the orchard without saying anything. The heat from the day was still lingering in the air, and the silence felt heavy with the weight of my dread. I waited for her to speak first.
"Pin-Lee told me what you told her about how you lost control of yourself earlier. I understand that you weren't acting maliciously, that you were experiencing some sort of flashback and you couldn't make sense of your surroundings. I'm worried about what's going on in your head right now. Do you think you could tell me what you're feeling?"
Mensah looked over my shoulder expectantly, but I couldn't think of anything to say. And I didn't think I would be able to make any words come out of my mouth if I tried.
Of course, Mensah was really good at patiently waiting for me to speak. It gave me a lot of time to think, since I could think a lot faster than a human. We walked in silence for two excruciating minutes that I mostly spent worrying about how late it was. Mensah was overdue for a rest period, and here I was making her stay up later to deal with me.
"You shouldn't have brought me here," is what I said when I managed to overcome whatever was making my tongue feel like lead.
"I shouldn't have invited you to the farm tonight?"
"No." I had to pause for several seconds. "You shouldn't have brought me to Preservation."
I didn't have any of my dark vision filters active because I didn't want to have to see more of her face than I had to. She was half-illuminated by the light from one of the planet's moons, though, and I when I snuck a glance it was difficult to tell what sort of expression she had. I thought she looked a little sad. I thought I might be a little sad too.
Her voice was sturdy though."SecUnit, I want you to understand that I have never once regretted bringing you to Preservation. What happened tonight doesn't change that."
Something in my chest felt like it was cracking open. How could Mensah say something like that to me, after what I had just done? She had been the first person to treat me with kindness, to treat me like I was something more than a piece of equipment, and this is how I repaid her. A short, broken noise escaped me, and I quickly covered my mouth with my hands before another could follow.
She let us walk in silence for another few minutes while I tried to get a hold of myself.
When I could speak again, I said, "I've hurt a lot of people before. But only because I had to, or because I had a governor module forcing me to. When I—earlier—I felt my governor module shocking me. I thought I was out on a contract again. But afterwards, I checked—my governor module is still inactive. But I still felt it."
She looked over at me, sharply. "Your governor module activated?"
The thing was, I didn't think that my governor module had actually activated. The sustained agony I had felt earlier wasn't like the short, purposeful shocks it usually administered. And there was no way it had randomly reinstated itself and then deactivated immediately afterwards. I didn't know how I could have imagined that pain, though.
"No, it didn't. But it felt like it did. I don't know what happened." I checked again; there was no trace of anything resembling a recent governor module activation in my code. It had to have come from my organic parts.
Dr. Mensah nodded. "It sounds like it was very scary for you. Do you know what triggered the episode?"
I replayed the events in my head three times before I gave in and answered, "No." Realizing that I didn't know what had caused it brought my performance reliability down two points. If I didn't know what had happened, it could happen again at any time. It could happen again now, without any warning. I wrapped both my hands around the opposite forearms, holding my gunports closed. Me being around my humans made them less safe, now.
"I think you should consider the possibility that if you didn't have a software issue earlier, the problem could have originated from your organic neural tissue. Is that possible, that an issue originating from your organic tissue could have caused you to lose access to digitally stored information?"
I didn't know. I didn't have any fucking clue how my own brain worked. "Maybe," I admitted. "Do you...do you think that my organic parts could have imagined my governor module shocking me too?"
Mensah took a moment to think about that. She seemed to be taking the idea seriously, which made me feel a little better. "I think that's entirely possible. Humans frequently experience phantom pains after injuries or trauma, and I think it makes sense that you would experience something similar."
"Oh," I said. That didn't seem like something that could happen to murderbots.
"Okay," she said softly, then paused. "SecUnit, you've experienced a lot of horrible things that nobody should have to experience, and you have a lot of lingering trauma from those experiences. No, don't make that face at me, you've done this for me and now I need to do this for you. We need to come up with a plan for you to get some form of trauma treatment."
I would have found that a lot easier to object to if my fucked-up brain hadn't just caused me to injure one of her children. As things stood, the only thing I could do was nod. If they weren't going to kick me out of Preservation or dismantle me, I had to make sure I never did this to anybody else.
"I don't know if it will work on me," I said.
"I think it will help you, SecUnit, I really do. I've found it very helpful myself, and I'm grateful to you for helping me start treatment. We can start slow. But we can't let this happen again."
Truthfully I didn't think there was any part of a human trauma treatment module that would help me. I didn't have a strong sense of what trauma treatments involved, but my brain was very different from a human brain. Maybe a trauma treatment would make it worse. I didn't know how to protest further.
We kept walking.
My brain was starting to calm down, a little bit. Risk assessment had dropped down to 38%. I wouldn't have to run out into the woods and spend the rest of my short existence hiding and trying to conserve my media. I was glad that I wouldn't. But I didn't know how I felt about being let off so lightly. It wasn't what I deserved.
"Where's Amena?" I asked her. She hadn't come back to the house with Dr. Mensah. I wondered if she was still at the hospital. Something in my chest hurt.
"She went to stay with her uncles tonight," Mensah said. "I thought it would be better for her to stay away from the house. She's absolutely fine, the Medsystem was able to fix her wrist without any problems."
"That's good," I said, even though it didn't make me feel any better.
We came to the end of the tree-section of the farm. The moon shined (shone? whatever) brighter in the open air, and Mensah stopped walking, her face turned up towards the sky.
She said, "Will you come back to the house tonight?"
"I don't think that's a very good idea," I told her.
She frowned, and said, "You are perfectly welcome to stay at the house tonight, but you don't have to if you don't want to. Would you prefer to go back to the station? Can I call a ground car to take you to the shuttle port?"
I did want to go back to the station. I wanted nothing more than to put myself in the closet in my locked room and shut off my feed access and then never speak to a human again. But I didn't want to take the ground car there.
"I'll walk," I said.
"If you're sure," she said. I was sure.
I walked her back to her house first. We said goodbye at her front door. Pin-Lee was still asleep on the front porch, so Dr. Mensah went to wake her up so she could sleep inside. I didn't stick around for that part. I turned back around and started on the long, long walk to the shuttle port.
Dr. Mensah caught me hanging around the port one afternoon a few weeks later. I was loitering on a bench near where most of the passenger ships came in. Several different ships had embarked and disembarked passengers recently, and the area was crowded with enough humans coming and going that nobody was paying me any attention at all. I watched Mensah approach using the intel drone I had stationed nearest to the main entrance.
"Amena will be very upset if you hop on the first transport you can and never come back," she said, far too casually, as she sat down on the bench a respectable distance away from me.
"Amena doesn't ever want to talk to me again," I said.
Mensah frowned at me. She had been doing that a lot lately. "SecUnit, I promise you that's not true. And if you would read any of the feed messages she's tried to send you then you would know that. I'm very grateful that you decided to stay here, and I hope I can convince you that none of us hold what happened against you. It was an accident, and you're working to make sure it won't happen again. But running away won't solve anything, and it will upset Amena."
I wondered when whether something would upset Amena had become a major point of consideration for me. Since when had any human's feelings become points of consideration for me. It sucked, and what sucked worse was that I was happier now than I had ever been back when I didn't have to care about how my actions made humans feel. Dr. Mensah was right, I didn't want to upset Amena. She didn't deserve that, especially after what I had done to her. I just wasn't sure that Mensah was telling me the truth about what her daughter wanted. Maybe she was letting her own human emotions color her perceptions.
"I wasn't actually planning on leaving," I said. And it was true. I mostly just liked to remind myself that I could, sometimes.
"I'm glad to hear that," Mensah said. "Will you stop avoiding Amena?"
"She's on the planet and I'm on the station. It's impossible to not avoid her."
"Very funny. Did you look at the list of potential therapists I sent you?"
I slouched down on the bench. "Fine, I'll stop avoiding Amena."
"And you'll look at the list?"
Ugh. "I'll look at the list."
"Thank you." She stayed seated, and I thought she might have something else she wanted to tell me. But after another minute she got up again, nodded to me, and walked away.
I had already deleted the messages Amena had sent me earlier without reading them, and she was still on the planet, so luckily my promise to stop avoiding her didn't actually require any effort on my part. I was still spending most of my time in my room, only making brief forays out into the station when I grew restless. I kept my feed status set to do not disturb, and all the humans I knew on the station seemed to know well enough to leave me alone.
A week later, one of the drones I kept stationed near the docks alerted me to the presence of a human who apparently did not know well enough to leave me alone. I tracked her path to my hotel room using the drones that I wasn't technically supposed to leave around the station when I wasn't nearby. (I kept them well hidden. No one had complained about them yet.)
Half an hour after that, Amena was standing outside my door. I hadn't left my room, despite having plenty of warning. You're welcome for not avoiding her, Dr. Mensah.
I seriously considered staying where I was laying face down on the sofa, but that seemed like too much of a dick move considering—everything. I got up and stood by the door, and sent the command to open it as soon as she knocked.
I had a single drone trained on Amena but I didn't dare look at her with my eyes. She was staring directly at my face, which was annoying, but I didn't really have to grounds to tell her to stop, so I tried to ignore it.
"Hi, SecUnit. How have you been doing?" Her voice was disturbingly chipper.
I gave the wall over her shoulder by best unimpressed glare.
"Right, okay, so that's a stupid question. I'm here to tell you that you can stop avoiding me. I'm not mad."
What the hell did she mean, she wasn't mad. "You should be mad."
"Well, I'm not. Second Mom explained that it was an accident. It would be nice to hear an apology from you though. You've been avoiding me for weeks. Doesn't really communicate 'sorry I attacked you for no reason.'"
Well, that succeeded in dredging up an emotional tangle that I had been working very hard to drown in media. I couldn't turn away from her and look at the wall either, which made it worse. I stood there for several seconds before I could make my voice strong enough to say, "I'm sorry I attacked you for no reason. I won't do it again." My face was definitely doing something unfortunate.
"Aw, thank you, SecUnit. I accept your apology." Her voice had a teasing lilt to it, like she was making fun of me. I frowned at her and she rolled her eyes.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?"
She wanted to come in now? I didn't know what the hell she could possibly want with me. Risk assessment was starting to give me some weird numbers, it probably couldn't be more unhelpful if it tried. I couldn't think of a graceful way to send her away, so I stepped to the side and let Amena walk into my apartment and sit down on my couch.
I had no idea what I was supposed to do now. Most of the media that I had seen tended to cut the scene after the heartfelt apology part, and get right back into the more interesting action. Unfortunately real life didn't work like that, and I was going to have to get through this like a murderbot who wasn't afraid to socialize.
What was a normal thing to say in this situation?
"So, um, was there anything else you wanted to talk about, or..." Maybe I should sit down on the couch with her? Never mind, that was a terrible idea. I stayed standing by the door.
"What, I'm not allowed to just hang out with you now?"
At my unimpressed stare, she relented. "Okay, fine, I did want to ask. Do you think you could tell me what happened that night? I couldn't get Second Mom to really say much besides that it was an accident, but. I think I'd like if you could tell me. If it wouldn't be too hard."
I didn't really want to tell her. Explaining what had been happening in my head would probably involve admitting to having emotions, which I hated. Unfortunately, I definitely owed her an explanation.
"Yes, I can tell you what happened. Um—" I then proceeded to not tell her what happened. I couldn't think of anything to say, and I really was trying. I hoped my cooling fans weren't making any audible noise. (They were.)
"It was some kind of flashback, right?" she asked. "Was it...was it something I did that caused it?"
Fuck. "It wasn't anything you did. I think something happened before you even went into the room. It wasn't your fault."
"Okay," Amena said. I risked a glance in her direction, but it didn't tell me much. She just looked quiet, and thoughtful.
"You just looked so afraid," she finally said. "I had never seen you look so afraid."
This was obviously an insane thing to say to me. "I didn't look afraid."
"How would you know what you looked like?" she shot back.
"I had drones," I said, which was technically a lie, but she didn't need to know that.
"Whatever," she said.
Another awkward pause.
"You don't have to do this," I told her. "You shouldn't have to be around me."
"Well, you don't get to tell me what to do," she said pleasantly. Then we lapsed into silence.
After five minutes, I finally gave up on standing and sat down on the opposite end of the couch as her. She was probably doing something in the feed, since humans aren't usually very good at just sitting silently without doing anything. I thought about opening up some media to watch in the background, because this was very stressful and boring, but I resisted the impulse. I owed it to Amena to figure out a way to make this better.
"I didn't know where I was," I finally said. "I thought I was on a contract, and that my governor module was still functional. It's like I just lost access to most of my memories all of a sudden. I don't know why. I don't know if it will happen again."
"You thought you were on a contract?" she asked. "Is that...did you do that kind of thing a lot, when you were...out on contracts?"
"Sometimes," I said. "It depended on what my job was. A lot of the time, my job was to enforce rules and keep indentured laborers from rebelling. We had to use physical violence sometimes, to keep them too afraid to break the rules. And the companies would use the MedSystem visits to add time to their contracts."
Amena kept shifting her eyes in my direction while keeping her face pointed at the empty display surface, like I wouldn't notice her looking at me.
"It's weird thinking of you doing that," she said.
"It's what the company built me for," I said.
"And that's why they had to build SecUnits with governor modules, because if you had free will you wouldn't have gone along with it."
Oh, I did not like the way this conversation was going at all. Amena had the completely wrong idea of what kind of person I was.
I kept doing my job with the company for 35,000 hours after I hacked my governor module, I sent her over the feed.
It took her a moment to open and read my message. Then another moment to presumably convert hours into years. "You were rogue for four years before you left?!"
"Did you think that the Preservation survey team hacked my governor module themselves?"
"I—no, I didn't but—you stayed there for four years? Stars, no wonder you're so—"
"So what?"
Amena took a deep breath. She looked a little upset, I thought.
"That just seems like the kind of thing that could mess you up, a bit."
"Clearly."
Amena fell quiet. I didn't know why I thought she had known already how long I had stuck with the company. I certainly hadn't told her before, and my other humans respected my privacy enough to not walk around gossiping about me. I didn't like to think about that period of my life, so I didn't. Nothing that had happened to me in real life during that time was worth thinking about it. I didn't want Amena to think about me in that context either, but unfortunately humans can't delete information from their brains.
"I'm glad you managed to get away. I'm glad that you're here now," she said, after she was presumably finished contemplating how miserable my existence was.
I couldn't help but pull a face at her for that, and she laughed a little bit at the sight of it. "It's weird to think of you like that," she said . "Like, I've always seen you as a protector, even if you can sometimes be annoying about it."
"You definitely didn't always see me as a protector," I said. I still remembered how perennially pissed off she had been about my presence before I had gotten her kidnapped by ART. Amena rolled her eyes.
"Well, I did say you can be really annoying about it."
That definitely did not deserve a response from me. But something happened in my brain and my mouth formed the word, "Sorry."
"Hmm?"
"I really am sorry," I said again, the words coming out of my mouth much too fast. "I mean. You know I won't ever hurt you again, right?"
"I know, SecUnit. I trust you." She smiled, and I had to turn away again. "And I know you didn't mean to. It was an accident, and I forgive you."
I nodded. My face felt weirdly hot, and a weird pinchy feeling was developing around my eyes. This had gone on for long enough.
"Do you want to watch Sanctuary Moon for a while?"
"That sounds good," she said. I turned on the display screen and cued up episode 397. It was nice to watch with a friend, sometimes.