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I was back on Preservation for a "vacation," and I wasn't having a completely terrible time so far. It was nice to check in on my humans and reassure myself that they were still alive, and they all acted like they were really happy to see me too, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, Three was also here, and as usual, it was doing its best to ruin my mood while acting like it was completely oblivious to how mood-ruining its actions were.
We were both on the planet right now, along with most of the humans that I cared about. Dr. Mensah's birthday was today, and for these humans, a whole year of continued survival called for a big celebration. (A big outdoor celebration with an enormous bonfire. My complaints about the enormous and extremely hazardous bonfire were not taken as seriously as they should have been.) I was extremely grateful for Mensah's continued survival, and I needed to keep an eye on the fire situation, so nobody had even needed to guilt me into going to the party, although it was way too crowded for my tastes. So far I had spent most of my time "lurking creepily" (those were Amena's words, not mine) around the edges.
The same couldn't be said for Three.
(It had spent the months since we had stolen it from Barish-Estranza exploring all the education options Preservation had to offer, doing pretty much what Mensah had envisioned for me when she had bought me from the company. It hadn't found anything it wanted to stick with so far, but it seemed content to travel around the planet and the station and try out new things without a shock collar embedded in its brain.)
Three really liked humans.
Humans seemed to really like Three too. It had spent the party in the thickest parts of the crowd, talking with humans it knew and with humans that were strangers, dancing tirelessly to the music that was being played live by actual humans with instruments. (Okay, I'll admit this was my favorite part of the party, and that I had more drones than necessary watching the different instruments. I had never seen music played live before.) But the dancing really confused me. I was willing to believe that humans had weirdly designed brains that got some kind of enjoyment from moving their bodies in unfathomable ways, but Three was a SecUnit, and I couldn't understand how dancing could be enjoyable for a SecUnit. It didn't even seem to care when people stared at it.
Right now, Three was taking a break from dancing. It stood at the edge of the designated dancing area, smiling widely and talking to Mensah's wife Farai.
My nearest drone was too far away for me to make out the specifics of their conversation, and I couldn't move it closer without alerting Three to the fact that I was actively paying attention to it. I didn't need to be able to hear them to get the gist though. They were both smiling, their postures relaxed, even though Three still held itself more stiffly than a human would. Farai laughed at something that Three said, her eyes screwing shut, and some liquid sloshed out of the glass she was holding before she managed to pull herself together again.
Farai and I generally got along pretty well these days, despite her initial suspicions about me existing in close proximity to her children and family members. I think that Amena liking me now had done a lot to improve her opinion of me. Plus the fact that since starting her trauma treatment, Dr. Mensah had become much less nervous and reliant on me, and so the adults in her family had in turn become much less suspicious of me. I didn't really care about their opinion of me, but I had to admit that existing on Preservation was a lot easier now that Mensah's adult relatives more or less tolerated my presence.
We greeted each other when it was necessary, and had had a few short conversations, about Dr. Mensah or their children or the weather. Farai had never given me the kind of smile she was currently directing at Three.
I moved my drone away. I didn't care what they were talking about. It's not like I had any interest in subjecting myself to idle conversation with Farai anyway. Having Dr. Mensah's marital partner like me wasn't necessary in order to provide security for Dr. Mensah. Not that Mensah even really needed security these days. Whatever.
(When we first showed up with Three, I had been prepared to defend it from the kind of reception that I had gotten when I first came here. It was still so new to being rogue, and interacting with humans on its own terms, and making decisions for itself. I had been worried that it got the same kind of semi-hostile reaction from the people of Preservation that I had gotten, it wouldn't want to stay.
I shouldn't have been worried. Barely anyone even cared that we brought another rogue SecUnit onto the station. We had a meeting with Indah shortly after our arrival, and all she told it was that it wasn't allowed to hack any non-public systems without permission. She didn't tell it that it had to have a feed profile that identified it as a SecUnit, or that we needed to alert station residents about its presence. She didn't even act mad that we had brought it here, and at the end of the meeting she had stood up, looked it right in the eye, and welcomed it to Preservation.)
(It's not like I had wanted to have to fight defend Three's right to exist here. But its first meeting with Indah had gone so much better than mine had that I left Station Security wanting to fight something.)
(Indah had never told me that it was okay if I didn't want to have a public feed profile anymore, but I took mine down as soon as I left her sight after that meeting.)
(It didn't even matter anyway, I was only on Preservation Station for two cycles before I continued on to Mihira and New Tideland with ART.)
Anyways. Birthday party for Mensah. It was loud, and too crowded, and people kept trying to talk to me. But I enjoyed watching Dr. Mensah and the rest of my humans enjoy themselves, and nobody got violent, and the fire stayed confined to the fire-zone.
Quite a few humans ended up staying the night after the party. The weather was warm, and some of the humans wanted to sleep outside, with no protection except for thin sleeping sacks. When I complained about this, Ratthi insisted that being able to see the stars was nice, and invited me to join them in stargazing before they slept. I didn't really see the point, but I sat down beside them anyway, because they were just begging to get eaten by some wandering fauna out in the open like this.
Three joined the stargazing more enthusiastically, and when the humans went to sleep, it laid down in the grass nearby and sent me a request to watch media together in the feed. I opened a connection and put on the first episode of Bovine Invaders from the Distant Future. We watched media together in silence for the rest of the night, which soothed my nerves somewhat after my long day of avoiding socializing.
In the morning, the humans discovered one of the many other disadvantages of sleeping outside, which was getting woken up as soon as the sun came up. They grumbled about this a little before accepting it and getting up to do human tasks like washing their mouths and going back to their own homes.
Three left shortly after, since it was scheduled to take an early transport back to one of the universities on the planet. It made some rounds before it left, saying goodbye to the humans that were awake to say goodbye to it.
Ratthi came back outside to lay in the grass next to me after using the sanitary facility inside, saying he was still too tired to commit to being awake just yet. I didn't mind; humans who were too tired to talk were my favorite kind of human to be around. I watched Sanctuary Moon in the background, but focused the larger part of my attention on the shifting colors of the sky as the nearest star rose higher and higher.
I was completely at peace for eight whole minutes, until Three came back out to say goodbye to me and Ratthi. I stayed seated, but Ratthi stood up and hugged Three for five entire seconds like it was the most normal thing in the world.
My face twisted involuntarily, and I turned away so neither one of them would see my expression. I pointed the single drone I had with me away too, so I didn't have to see theirs.
Three pinged me, and I pinged back, not trusting myself to look at it. Then it turned away and started walking towards the road.
Ratthi delicately folded himself back down onto the ground next to me. He didn't say anything for a minute, just stared into the trees at the edge of the grass. I did the same thing, trying to look like I was doing it in a normal way rather than an irrationally upset way. Then Ratthi said carefully, "Do you think you're up for a conversation about emotions right now?"
That snapped me out of the funk I was in and simultaneously deposited me straight into a different, possibly worse funk. I turned to face him so he could see me rolling my eyes. He held his hands up in apologetic gesture and said, "I know, I know! It's just, I don't think I've ever seen you look as upset as you looked just now."
So he had seen my expression. Great. "You know you're not supposed to look at my face."
"Well, it's hard to help sometimes. Long habit. Do you want to talk about what's up?"
"No," I said. But I didn't get up. Ratthi seemed to take that as a cue to keep talking.
"It looked like it bothered you that I hugged Three just now. Am I right about that?"
I shrugged, not willing to confirm but also not willing to lie and say that it wasn't true.
Ratthi was patient for a human, and he had a lot of experience talking to me about things I didn't want to talk about. He stayed silent for almost a whole minute, waiting for me to actually answer. It had to be pretty boring for him, but it was even more boring for a SecUnit with a processing speed that far outstripped a human's. Stressful and boring enough that I started wondering why I even cared so much that Three was apparently on hugging terms with my humans.
This was already awkward, so I decided to give him a real answer. "It wasn't the hug. I just—Three is... better at interacting with humans than I am. Everyone seems to like it a lot," I said, feeling like an idiot. Then I shrugged again, like that would make it better.
Ratthi winced. "Ah. You're worried that some people might like Three better than you?" he said, easily cutting through that bullshit.
I wasn't worried that my humans liked Three better than me, I knew it was true. Sure I had saved all their lives several times over, but I couldn't be actual friends with them like Three could. I wasn't good at conversations. I was an asshole even when I made an effort to be nice. I was antisocial to the point that it was a strain for me to even be in the same room as them for more than a few hours. And I wasn't any fun. After watching Three socialize with them all night, I thought it was a miracle they even tolerated my presence when I wasn't needed to provide security.
This was another question I didn't want to answer, so instead I fully turned my body around until I was sitting with my back towards Ratthi instead. (Which was more antisocial behavior that most humans didn't like.)
Ratthi hummed thoughtfully. I watched through a drone as he picked several strands of grass out of the ground and started twisting them together in a complicated way.
He turned his head so he was looking directly into my nearest drone, and said, "I have to confess that I don't quite understand why you feel that way, and I want to reassure you that it isn't true, but I think it would help me if you explained your thought process here."
My face was getting warm. I pulled up my legs so that I could hide my face in my knees, even though I was still facing away from Ratthi. I had already said too much.
"Please, SecUnit." His expression was so earnest, but when I looked closer I thought he seemed a little bit sad. And that scared me, because if he was sad right now it had to be because of something that I'd done. I was not managing this conversation well, and should probably start doing damage control now.
So I cracked. "It's fine if you like Three better than me, okay? It's way nicer than me. It's fine, I don't care." The words came out of my mouth too fast in my rush to reassure him, and I stumbled awkwardly over some of the syllables.
Ratthi's eyes widened, and he did an exaggerated blink that wouldn't have looked out of place in some of the more dramatic serials I watched. A weird kind of pressure was developing behind my eyes, and I pressed my face harder into my knees.
Ratthi's voice was gentle, like he was talking to a juvenile human, which made this even more embarrassing. "I don't like Three better than you," he said. "You and Three are different people. Nobody expects you to have the same personality, or to like the same things. That's a part of being a person. And sure, Three is more...openly friendly than you. Most people are, to be perfectly honest. But that doesn't mean we like you any less."
The pressure being my eyes was getting worse, not better, even as something else in my chest seemed to loosen. I opened up my media folder and scanned through the titles for moral support while I processed his words, trying and failing not to feel ridiculous for how relieved I was.
Ratthi didn't let up. "I didn't realize that it bothers you when we hug Three. You don't want us to hug you, do you?"
Absolutely fucking no. Ratthi smiled at how vigorously I shook my head, since I was too horrified by the idea to speak. "Right! Okay, I didn't think so. Just figured I should double check."
My face still felt too warm, and I was trying hard not to think too hard about the fact that at least some of my humans would probably be very happy if I decided I did want to hug them. I was grateful that none of them had ever complained about it where I could hear them, and nobody seemed to mind that I didn't want to participate in their social rituals. It seemed like they just accepted it as one of the many weird things that came with me being a SecUnit. But then Three came along and started demonstrating that a lot of my issues didn't stem from the fact that I was a SecUnit; they stemmed from me being me. And I didn't know if that would change things.
"It doesn't make any sense," I said. "I don't actually want to do any of the things Three is doing. I shouldn't be mad at it. It can do whatever it wants."
"Feelings don't always make sense," Ratthi said. "And...I don't want to tell you what you're feeling, but to me it doesn't sound like you're mad at Three. To me, it sounds like you might be a little bit jealous of it."
"I'm not," I said, deciding it would be easier to just ignore most of that. Jealous? I wasn't jealous of Three. It was a SecUnit. I was a SecUnit. There was no reason for either of us to be jealous of the other.
"It would be okay if you were," he said. "You can still be jealous of an expression of friendship, even if it's not actually something you would want to do with us yourself."
I turned around enough to look at Ratthi with my eyes and I made a face at that, on purpose for dramatic effect. "You don't think you're getting ahead of yourself, using the word friendship around me?" I said, aiming for a joking tone, and not really managing it.
He still smiled. "Forgive me, I thought it'd be okay to say just this once."
The weird thing was—I didn't think the fact that Ratthi had just implied that we were friends had bothered me the way it might have in the past. I knew he didn't mean anything weird by it. Or at least, anything weirder than the normal weirdness that came with a human being sort-of friends with a rogue SecUnit, which still seemed kind of impossible to me if I thought about it for more than one second. But here I was, being friends with a human, against all the odds. And here was Three, doing the same thing.
I guess the problem with having nice humans who are willing to be friends with a rogue SecUnit was that they'll want to be friends with other rogue SecUnits too.
I hadn't been thrilled when Three decided that it wanted to stay on Preservation with my humans. It nearly made me change my mind about going back to the University with ART. But my humans had put a lot of effort into convincing me that it would be safe with them, and they would be safe with it. And it was still so clueless about how to exist without a governor module, and I had thought my humans could probably do a better job than I could of acclimating it. I just hadn't expected that they would do such a good job, and that the next time I saw Three it would be like this. At ease with its position relative to others, in a way I was only starting to grasp myself.
I stared down at a tiny insect fauna that was crawling along a leaf of grass and used the disgusted feeling I got watching it to fortify myself for what I was about to say. I could barely get my voice louder than a whipser. "It's not even the hugging. It's everything. It's so good at talking to people. I don't understand why these things are so much easier for it. I've had way more experience being rogue than it."
Ratthi hummed and said, "Do you remember what Three was like, back on the Perihelion, right after 2.0 hacked its governor module?"
"Obviously." I'd had a lot of stressors in my life during that period of time, but the unsecured rogue SecUnit wandering around acting like a nervous prey fauna had been a pretty major one.
Ratthi's voice was soft. Pensive, maybe. "It was terrified. It was hard to tell at first, because it was still trying so hard to pretend like it didn't have emotions, but the more time I spent around it, the easier it was for me to tell how scared it was. It didn't have any idea how to exist as a person with free will. We did as much as we could to help it feel comfortable, and even then it was weeks before it managed to tell somebody no."
The first time that Three had said no to a human had been kind of funny. Three had taken an interest in the big tank of colorful fish that ART had in its greenhouse, and had once spent an entire day fixated on watching them swim around. Amena had poked her head into the room and asked Three if it wanted to join her and some of ART's crew for a craft night, and it had refused without thinking about it. Upon realizing what it had said, it immediately started apologizing in a panic, and Amena had to reassure it that it could keep watching the fish if it wanted to. She had returned to the crew lounge weirdly excited to relay the news of Three's progress.
"You probably would have thrown a party for it if I hadn't stopped you."
"I wouldn't have gone that far." Ratthi smiled, apparently reliving the memory. "Anyway, we did our best to help Three, but we didn't really know what kind of support a newly free SecUnit needs, we were just guessing. And you didn't know either, because you never had any external support when you were newly rogue. And I couldn't help but think about how different things must have been for you, when you hacked your governor module."
My fingers tore strands of grass from the ground without my conscious control. I didn't want Ratthi to try and imagine what I might have been like after I hacked myself. I didn't think I had ever behaved at all like Three had, and I didn't want to think about how things might have been different if I'd been with my PresAux humans instead. How I might have been different.
More emotion was creeping into Ratthi's voice as he spoke. "Now—and stop me if this is too much. But you had four years of hiding and surviving before you were able to interact with others as yourself. Three got to have that as soon as it was freed. I can't imagine what it must have been like for you to learn to make your own decisions in the conditions you were trapped in. You had to do it alone."
That wasn't quite fair. "Well. I had Sanctuary Moon," I said. I dropped the grass strands I had torn from the ground. They smelled kind of bad, and had stained bits of my skin green.
"But you didn't have anyone to talk to, anyone to support you. You and Three come from different contexts, and you're different people. It's impossible to tell which characteristics are innate and which are the result of one's particular life experiences. But I can't help but think that having to hide and stay enslaved for fear of death for years after hacking your governor module has made it much harder for you to feel comfortable interacting with humans the way Three does."
How could Ratthi just say things like this?
"That's too much," I said.
"That's fair," he said. "But the point is, whatever the reason, it's okay to interact with the world in your own way. We like you the way you are."
I couldn't speak. I moved my drone closer to him, and very gently bumped it against his shoulder. When I pulled away again he was smiling at it, so I hoped he understood my meaning.
Then he perked up. "Actually, wait a minute—you know what a fist bump is, right?"
"I don't want to do that either," I said quickly.
"Yeah, I know but—here," he said, holding his fist out in front of him. "Can you bump your drone into my fist like you just did?"
Oh. I followed his instructions and maneuvered my drone into a little fist bump maneuver. My drone was tiny enough that it probably looked pretty ridiculous, and Ratthi made weird little finger movements as he pulled his fist back. But I didn't hate it.
"How do you feel about doing that instead of a hug for hellos and goodbyes? It can be just our thing," he said, grinning.
Ratthi politely looked away from me and away from the drone while I tried to have an emotion as quietly as possible. After several seconds I dug my fingers into the fleshy part of my other arm and drew in a breath that was steady enough for me to say, "That sounds okay."
"Okay," he said, and then he stood up. "I'm going to go inside and see if I can find something to eat before I head out. You want to come with?"
"I'm gonna stay out here for awhile," I said. The last thing I needed right now was more humans looking at me.
"Alright. Take care of yourself then. I'll see you later," he said, and he reached out his fist again. I tapped it with my drone and he wiggled his fingers to complete the ritual. Then he pushed himself off the ground and ambled back towards the house, leaving me alone in the yard.
My drones hadn't seen Dr. Mensah leave her bedroom yet, and it was early enough that she was likely still asleep. I had nowhere else to be today, so I got up and started down one of the walking trails that would take me alongside the lake, and sank as deeply into episode 141 of Sanctuary Moon as I could manage. It couldn't distract me entirely from the emotion that was still wreaking havoc on my organic neural tissue, but it made it a little easier to bear. And as I walked and the emotion kept sitting with me, and I realized that it might not be a bad one.