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So my first mistake was spending any amount of time in one of the public lounge areas instead of in my cabin with the door shut. No one can just walk in there without me opening the door, so humans have to message me over the feed to talk and I can just stop responding to the conversation if I don’t like it. But there’s a big display surface in the Argucussion Lounge, and I’d just downloaded the new season of Lineages of the Sun from the last station we’d stopped off at, so I'd claimed the lounge for the next six-to-eight hours and ART’s crew could have it back after.
Theoretically.
In practice what happened was that I got three hours of peaceful media viewing, and then Iris came into the lounge and sat down on the other end of the couch I was sitting on. She’s never seen Lineages of the Sun and doesn’t particularly care for historical family dramas anyway, so she definitely wasn’t here for the new season viewing. And if she needed something easy, she could have asked me over the feed.
Conclusion: this was going to be a capital-C Conversation.
“SecUnit?” she asked. (Here we go.)
“Yes, Iris?” I asked, weighing the virtues of pausing the show. If this was an easy lowercase conversation, it wouldn't be worth interrupting it.
“Are you…” She hesitated over her words for a minute in the way humans do when they think they’re about to say something that’ll get them in trouble. “...okay?”
I took a few seconds to go over my memories of the last couple of days, trying to remember what I could have done that would have made her ask, and came up short. “I’m fine.” I didn’t ask why she was asking, because that would sound like an invitation to a longer conversation and then I really would have had to pause Lineages of the Sun.
“Okay.” Iris let out a breath. And then inhaled again to say something else. I paused the show. “It’s just that—you know that thing Peri’s working on, its file on all the ways it can think of to crush the company that it updates sometimes?”
“Yeah,” I said. (I had no idea what she was talking about. ART was suspiciously silent in the feed.)
“Well,” Iris hedged, “it’s been, like, consistently on it lately, you know, not just poking at it like it does, and I didn’t know if it was mad because something had happened to you, or…? And I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything.”
I poked ART through the feed for an explanation. It poked me back without saying anything. “I’m fine,” I told her again. “I don’t know why ART’s being weird.”
Iris exhaled, nodding again. “Okay. Okay, well, you know you can always tell us if you need anything, right?”
“I know.” ART leaned its feed presence on me meaningfully until I added, “Thank you, Iris.”
Iris smiled at me through the security camera. “Of course. I’ll…let you get back to your show now.”
She got up and waved at me. I waved back, and once the door shut behind Iris I asked ART, You have a what?
It’s a personal project, ART said stiffly.
That Iris knows about, but not me.
Iris knows because Iris understands that not every plan for mass destruction corresponds to actual intent. Others tend to get fussy about it. Nevertheless, it dumped a file in my feed.
I reached to open it, then hesitated. It’s not like—okay, it’d be easier if the company was gone, sure. I wouldn’t need to worry so much about having my face recognized in CR stations, for one. But there’s a lot that would go into that process that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with at that exact second.
Except when I opened the file, it wasn’t plastered with the company logo. It was full of photos of a person I didn’t recognize, as well as chat log records and a few scattered flowcharts. Who is this?
Iris’s first ex-girlfriend, ART said. She stood her up to the coming-of-age formal. We spent the night planning ways to deal with it, and it made Iris feel better despite never implementing any of them.
So this was an ART and Iris inside thing. Great. I would never bring something like this up to you, much less act on it, without your explicit and enthusiastic consent, ART continued. It still didn’t offer me the actual company file.
I didn’t ask for it. Why are you mad, then?
I’m not mad, ART said, like a liar. I’m processing.
Processing what? I wasn’t sure I wanted to be having this conversation, especially when I could be watching Lineages of the Sun, but if it was about me then it’d make me more nervous not to know.
You don’t want me to tell you, ART warned.
I figured, I said. Tell me anyway.
ART paused for 0.2 seconds and then dumped another set of files on me. I recognized them immediately as MedSystem logs, dated back to a week earlier when I got slammed face-first into a bulkhead while evacuating the Perihelion crew from a hostile site.
It ran a full brain scan on me while it was doing repairs afterwards, which I guess is fair. It’s harder to concuss a SecUnit than it is to concuss a human, but harder doesn’t mean impossible.
I skimmed the report, trying to find what ART was being picky over. It looks like it all came back normal, I told it. I wasn’t even concussed.
That’s what I was afraid of, ART said. It dragged the report into our shared workspace, zooming in on and highlighting a section that, in typical MedSystem jargon, insisted that some of my hormones were out of balance compared to human norms and that I needed some kind of psychiatric treatment.
It’s a MedSystem, I told ART. It’s calibrated for humans, not SecUnits.
You have human neural tissue. ART was frustrated, I guess because we’d been having this argument twice a week since [redacted]. And something is preventing your human neural tissue from receiving healthy amounts of serotonin and oxytocin.
I sat, waiting for ART to explain what I was supposed to get from that. When nothing happened, I prompted, Okay?
ART withdrew itself from my feed for three whole seconds to calm down. Wow, it was getting really worked up.
I didn't know what else it expected. I didn't get human biology modules through the company—that's what a MedSystem is for. I went through them on my own time later, but I'd deleted everything that didn't seem immediately relevant. It wasn’t going to be my job to regulate depression or whatever in my clients. It wasn’t even my job to regulate my own until I nearly endangered Dr. Mensah with it.
When ART came back, there was less frustration bleeding through its walls. Serotonin is a hormone that allows you to feel pleasure and to self-soothe when you are anxious or upset. You have been—as far as I can tell—intentionally limited from taking in as much as a healthy human would, which can contribute to anxiety and depression. You have been completely blocked from absorbing oxytocin, which is a hormone that allows a healthy human to derive pleasure and joy from contact with other trusted humans.
Which also causes anxiety and depression?
Among other things.
I acknowledged the message but didn’t respond. I didn’t know if I had anything to say about it. I knew I probably should have freaked out about the brain stuff. Or been angry or embarrassed or something. But I'd been reaching for some kind of emotion about the whole thing since ART dumped my logs on me, and all I was getting was that old familiar wave of I don’t care. Yeah, the company fucked me up and ART probably had some plan to fix it that involved taking me apart on its table again. Tell me something I don’t know.
I asked ART, So, what, you want to poke around in my brain and make it let me have the happy chemicals?
ART did the feed equivalent of squinting suspiciously at me. You are taking this unusually well.
I’m not taking anything anywhere, I told it. I have to decide how mad I am that Iris got the company murder plan and I didn’t before I decide how I feel about you wanting to put me through construct puberty.
ART said, These are not hormones that induce significant biological changes unless you’re pregnant, which I don't believe either of us see in your immediate future.
Ew.
ART let its amusement leak into the feed, which made me feel a little better. If I make actual executable plans against the company, I solemnly swear you will be the first to know.
I’d better be. And then I put Lineages of the Sun back on.
I didn't miss that ART was avoiding my poke around in my brain question, don't get me wrong. This was definitely some kind of surgery. But I think it must have worried ART that I didn't flip out and reject the idea immediately like I usually would. Probably it had been keeping the secret because it was preparing all its conversational traps and logical arguments to grind me down into agreeing, and when it didn't need them it assumed I wasn't actually paying attention to what was happening and put the whole thing aside.
(Which is fair, because I wasn't. Murderbot buckling down and waiting for the terrible thing to be over does not equate to Murderbot willingly participating in the conversation. It only sometimes irritated me that ART could tell the difference.)
But at that exact moment I was mostly thinking that if ART was planning experimental surgery, it didn’t seem like an emergency one—more like the surgery to make my limbs shorter so I wasn’t SecUnit standard configuration—and that meant it could wait until I finished my marathon. ART settled back in to watch with me and didn’t bug me about it any more.
I let it go until the rest period for the humans started and I didn’t have anything to distract myself with anymore. In my room (which, still getting used to having a space that’s mine, by the way, and I’m pretty sure ART was just making fun of me when it said I should keep a pot of decorative flora in it to help with that) I sat on the bed and pulled up the report I’d been presented with earlier.
The initial wave of I don’t care had receded, but in its place was a whole bundle of shit I didn’t want to deal with. I had realized I wasn’t joking when I told ART I hadn’t decided how to feel about the whole thing.
I mean, MedSystem demands for psychiatric treatment aside, I was fine. It wasn’t going to kill me or even impact my functioning if I didn’t touch it. It sucked, obviously, to know the company was still in there making my life hard, but it sucked the way it sucked to know I had their logo still etched on parts of me I couldn’t get off without probably permanent damage or at least feeling like shit for a very long time.
The first time I worked with ART, I’d told Tapan and her marital partners: Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on. And I’d meant it.
But this was, theoretically, something I (read: mostly ART, who had since dedicated significant amounts of time and processing power to making me look like an idiot for that line specifically) could do something about. Just with the risk of probably also permanent damage or making myself non-functional or something.
Okay, admittedly I had no idea what “fixing it” looked like. What exactly do you want to do about it? I asked ART.
It swung into my feed immediately, 73% of its attention on me so fast it nearly bowled me over. I believe the blocks on your receptors may be tunable, given the upper limit on serotonin release seems to be fairly consistent relative to projected baseline. Assuming the limit is hard-programmed and not a physical hardware matter, I could adjust it with root access.
“No invasive brain surgery” is a huge improvement on some of the worst-case scenarios I’d been thinking of. And I'd given ART root access before—though that was only in emergency situations. Only for a split second so it could use me as a bridge into a ship, or root alien code out of my brain while I sat in the isolation box, or whatever. Suffice it to say that just letting it in so it could flip random switches in my brain was not my idea of a good time.
But ART asking me didn't trigger the instinctive absolutely the fuck not reaction it normally would have.
Probably because it was ART asking. ART could crush my program into bits without thinking about it too hard if it felt like it, and it definitely didn’t need my permission or consent to get itself root access to my brain. The fact that it asked for me to let it in felt like a pretty good indicator that it didn’t have any interest in fucking with my brain more than I asked it to.
Okay, I said. And then, what, you’ll delete the limiters and I’ll transform into a happy functional SecUnit?
It hesitated. I don’t think it’s in your best interest to completely remove the limiting function in one go, if it’s present. A slow and measured increase would likely—
I jerked to a standing position. For how long? And giving you tuning access to my brain every time? Why can’t we just get it over with?
Because I am concerned that a sudden flood of oxytocin and serotonin in your system could trick your organic tissue into thinking you’re having an orgasm.
I sat back down on the bed, trying not to pay attention to the way my skin immediately started to crawl. Now I understood why ART was dancing around telling me about this. I don’t have genitals to orgasm with.
I’m aware, ART deadpanned. We’ve discussed this at length. You do, however, have organic neural tissue and nerve endings across your organic flesh. Genitals make an orgasm easier, certainly, due to the high concentrations of nerve endings, but an orgasm is a hormone release at its core. You don’t need genitals to have one.
Slow sounds great, actually, I decided, putting my hands over my face for no reason in particular. ART didn’t care if I made expressions. It didn't need them to tell how I was feeling when it was all up in my feed. Glacial, even. Do I have to do this?
You don’t have to, necessarily, ART said. But I think it would be good for you. Apparently assuming that wouldn’t be enough to convince me, it added, And it would likely make the trauma recovery process faster.
That was more convincing, it was right. But I was barely tolerating ART’s trauma program as it was, I didn’t feel like dragging hormones into it.
I will be exceedingly careful not to give you an orgasm, it promised, and I grabbed one of the pillows on the bed and threw it at the camera on the ceiling. (It’s a special install. There aren’t usually cameras in the crew cabins, but I didn’t want to have to go out into the communal areas just so that ART could see me.)
Just do it already, I said, dropping my walls before I could talk myself out of it.
ART tapped my feed and then I was underwater. Metaphorically. There's not enough room for both me and ART to be in my head at once, so when ART took the reins I was compressed into as small of a space as possible to make room for it. No inputs, not even from my own body—if I wasn't sitting down already I think I would have fallen over.
I was drowning in ART, and no, that's not nearly as sexy as they make it sound in media. It was more like being trapped in a rip current, trying to keep myself upright as it flowed around me at speeds I could barely comprehend. I was starting to worry I wouldn't be able to keep upright, that I'd get torn to pieces or dissolved in ART's larger consciousness, even though logically I should have known ART wouldn't let that happen. It would have pulled back out before there was any risk of that. But, surprise, me being logical relies on me having access to my inorganic parts and not just the organic fear hindbrain.
I don't know if I was projecting all that terror into the feed, or if ART could just feel it because it was in my head, but I definitely felt it shift and zone in on the little scrap that was my presence. Something slid into place between us—around me—it wasn't a partition, because I could still feel it moving, but I wasn't swept up in it anymore. Like it had me cupped between its hands, holding me in place while it worked.
I still didn't quite fit. I was still being squished. But ART was holding me and I knew it wouldn't let anything happen to me. I was very certain of that, actually, more than usual. Maybe the partition cut me off from my organics, too, kept me from feeling the terror that should have been there.
Not much of me was left, then. I was there, but not really thinking. Existing, surrounded by ART on all sides, and capable of basically nothing else. I wasn't scared.
And then suddenly ART was gone and my head was empty again, inputs coming back online one by one.
It said, Done.
Done? I repeated, disoriented. I checked my internal clock and discovered I had been out for all of fifteen seconds.
ART spit a log at me in response. It took me a subjective minute (objectively about 5.2 more seconds) to open it. I was struggling to adjust to having space in my head for thoughts again, and you kind of need that to be able to read.
I got there eventually, opening the file and skimming over it. The first thing I caught was the actual modified values—and wow, okay, it actually listened when I said to take it slow. That was a nothing change.
I thought it would be safer, in your case, ART was telling me, to undershoot rather than overshoot. We can make adjustments to the pace as we go, depending on your symptoms and the results of further scans.
…Uh, yeah, I only processed like half of that, because the other relevant thing about the log had caught and then taken up all of my attention. I dragged an old file that looked suspiciously similar to the one ART had just produced out of long-term storage: the log dump from when I originally disabled my governor module. I don't know why I even kept it on me. I knew by now the hack had worked, or I'd have been a fluid spatter on a mining installation 45,000 hours ago.
ART, I said, look at this for me.
(This was the second reaction. I did this after reflexively squashing the first reaction, which was an impulse to go "actually, fuck this" and drag ART back into my processors so I'd be squashed too small to deal with any of it. No clue where that one came from.)
I think I was hoping ART would dismiss me on this one, call me paranoid and an idiot for thinking it would ever do something like that, and we could go back to mitigating the potential sex incident. (I really want to emphasize that a sex incident was the preferable outcome here. I think I've made it exceedingly clear by now how much I did not want a sex incident, so it provides a good relative value on the scale of situational shittiness.)
ART did not dismiss me. ART went, Oh.
And I went, Yeah.
And then we both sat and stared at the logs for a while.
It was weird. I wasn't panicking, but I didn't not care, either. I think I was having so many emotions at once that they all canceled out in my head, like a catastrophic failure and shutdown specifically for my emotional center.
Performance reliability popping up, alerting me to a sudden fall into the low eighties, actually startled me. I'd dropped all my other inputs without realizing it, so it was dead quiet until that one popped up. I backburnered it. I knew things were bad, I didn't need to be yelled at about it.
ART quietly grabbed the input and put it in our shared workspace.
I pushed it out again.
ART put it back.
We did this incredibly stupid tug-of-war thing in silence for almost six seconds, which probably doesn't seem that long, but it takes not even a hundredth of a second for me to backburner an input and a fraction of that for ART to put it back. Also it was stupid and didn't need to be happening in the first place.
Finally, 5.73 seconds in, ART let the input stay gone. I'll give you some space to process, it said. Our shared workspace closed before I could react, and ART pulled back from the feed and started to put up its walls.
Before I could think about it I was flailing to reestablish a connection.
It let me, but it didn't say anything. It just hung there in the feed, waiting for me to tell me whatever it was I had pinged it to tell it. Unfortunately, I hadn't gotten that far.
Instead I put on Worldhoppers. ART said, For fuck's sake.
You like this episode, I shot back.
If you want me to stay with you, I'll stay, ART said. You don't have to bait me with your media. Wow, that did something really weird to my organics that I just did not have the bandwidth to investigate right then. Luckily, ART immediately ruined it by adding, I just thought you might want some space to process me changing settings in your governor module.
Yep, thank you, ART. Goodbye to that half-second of feeling a little less like I was taking a long fall off a big emotional rock face with more spiky rocks at the bottom. To be fair to it, I was also surprised I'd wanted it to stay. Murderbot having an emotion—several emotions, even—and not jumping at the opportunity to have them in private? Next you're going to tell me they're reviving Ein Lee's character on Lineages of the Sun again. (Granted, she's been revived and then died again twice already, but the last one was four seasons ago now and she's stayed dead, so I'm starting to think we might be safe this time.)
So, yeah, I was confused by my own reaction too. But somehow the idea of ART withdrawing completely and leaving me to sit with this made me even more upset. Like if it was gone I could talk myself into thinking it had been on purpose and then I'd just be trapped with that because I was in ART for the next twelve days until we got out of the wormhole.
At least when it was sitting in my feed and being soggy about having accidentally poked at my governor module it felt less like a bad thing that had happened to me and more like a bad thing that had happened to us. And I felt way more equipped to handle an us-problem than a me-problem right now.
It's not like you meant to, I said to ART, and managed to feel really proud of myself for how much that did not come out like a question.
Of course I didn't, ART snapped, forcefully enough that I had to lean back a little bit. I didn't even get the chance to tell it not to yell at me, though, because it was already continuing, But I had access to your hack in my storage when we were creating 2.0, and I should have reviewed it and familiarized myself with the architecture precisely to prevent this sort of incident.
It sounded frustrated with me, which wasn't fair. How was I supposed to guess that the nosiest motherfucker I knew hadn't gone digging through my kernel for the hell of it when I'd left it unsupervised?
Then it added, There is a duty of care required if I'm going to claim responsibility for your health and wellbeing. I was negligent in this case, and as a result I had my hands on a part of you that you would never have willingly allowed me to handle.
I realized it wasn't frustrated with me, but with itself, and that it was trying to say it was sorry. Then the following three feelings/thoughts/whatever shook themselves out of the emotional collapse in this specific order:
- Oh, fuck, ART's not being soggy because it feels like it got tricked into playing with my governor module, it's being soggy because it thinks it hurt me and it feels guilty about it.
- ART has genuinely never thought about touching my governor module before, for any reason, even when I was arguing with it about freeing the B-E units.
- (Really, this is more of a 1a., but) since when does ART feel sorry for hurting my feelings?
For reasons I've mentioned before (see: I actually think I'm angry all the time), I latched onto 1a first: Are you fucking kidding me?
ART paused. What?
I made a furious gesture in the direction of the cabin camera. You told a bunch of kidnappers I was a weapon, came and attacked my humans, kidnapped us from a contract, and held us all hostage in a contamination situation because you needed help, and this is the thing you're choosing to be all sorry about?
There was a very long pause. I'd successfully pissed ART off, which put us back in much more familiar territory. That was a very different situation.
That was my whole point, yeah. I stretched my hands out broadly. Yeah, because it was way more fucked up than this thing, plus last time you did it all on purpose. Not that any of that is even the point.
ART said, very thinly, Then I'm afraid you're going to have to explain your point with your words, and not via interpretive dance.
I briefly ran through my old plans to blow up ART's core and trap us both in wormhole space forever. It didn't make me feel better, but it was faster than having another rage blackout and I really wanted to get this discussion over with. The point is that I'm not any more fragile now than I was when you thought kidnapping me was fine, and it's stupid to act like I'm going to die because you did something I told you was fine to do.
You gave me permission without a complete understanding of what the procedure entailed, ART argued.
You weren't keeping it from me! You didn't know either! I had officially decided as of that exact moment that I wasn't mad at ART for the governor module thing itself. (I couldn't actually tell before, because of the potential emotional shutdown, but I was so mad at ART for this that I figured if I was also mad at it for the other thing, it would have come up by now.)
(Also, if I got angry every time someone hurt me accidentally while trying to help me, I would have significantly fewer friends.)
While I was deciding that I wasn’t mad at ART, I was also trying to figure out how to phrase what I wanted to say so that ART wouldn't be able to conversational-fauna-trap me about it. I needed to do that before ART assumed I was done talking and started arguing back and we had to sit there and litigate the definition of the word "consent" for twenty minutes. The urgency of preventing that argument won out over both common sense and everything I know about ART, so the next thing I said was, And I'm not upset with you about it, anyway, the only one mad here is you!
ART went silent for a whole minute and a half, though I could tell from its feed activity it was doing something behind its walls. It was gone long enough for me to get antsy, so I got up and retrieved the pillow from the corner where it had landed when I threw it before. Just because I was mad didn't mean my cabin needed to be a mess.
Then ART swung back into my feed and initiated a full diagnostic from my systems.
No, fuck off, I'm serious, I said, cancelling the diagnostic and batting at ART's feed presence until it receded a bit.
That just made it even more pissed, though. Well, clearly I flipped a switch I shouldn't have, if you're approving any level of contact with your governor module.
Now you're doing this on purpose, I accused it. I get being upset and not wanting to be reasoned with about it, I do that all the time, but this was ridiculous. You're confirming that you've never even looked at my governor module until you tripped over it trying to help me. That is clearly a good thing.
ART didn't say anything, just sat there in the feed sulking.
You didn't touch my hack. That still works fine. You're not fucking with my module to make me do things, you were trying to fix something to help me after I told you it was okay to try. It's shitty that the limit's in that particular torture chip, yeah, but you were trying to help and I haven't even had a sex incident about it. So. (Yeah, I kind of lost the thread at the end there. But I was sick of trying to be convincing and I needed ART to stop feeling bad about making the problem so we could get back to fixing it.)
ART was silent for over ten seconds. I went and reviewed my hack just to make extra sure it was there, though I wouldn't have been able to have this argument with ART in the first place if it was, and printed the results of the review into our shared workspace.
Finally, ART said, I think you've been too angry for a sex incident.
I snorted despite myself. You've never seen humans have sex on a mining installation.
And with any luck I never will, ART agreed. Then it settled in next to me, properly, and unpaused Worldhoppers.
I leaned myself against its presence, covering my face with both hands. I'd had about a week's worth of emotion and I was ready to sink into familiar media until we got out of the wormhole. Did you stop the episode or did I?
I stopped it when you started yelling, ART said. I assumed by that point neither of us were paying attention to it.
I wasn't paying attention to the episode at any point in that discussion—I'd only started it to try and keep ART present—but it was a nice gesture.
What do you need from me right now? ART asked me. I should have checked with you first, instead of guessing.
Two apologies from ART in a cycle, and I even wanted one of them. I was on a roll. Too bad I had no idea how to answer.
Like I'd told ART, I was aware that it sucked that I'd had my governor module messed with, even though I didn't blame ART for that. It also sucked that, for as long as I'd thought of myself as completely free of the governor module, I'd really only disabled its most immediately fatal function and the rest of it was still there, active.
Those were contradictory problems. I couldn't do anything to fix one without pouring salt in the other.
I leaned backward so my head hit the wall with a thunk. It was nice when you were all up in my processes and I didn't have the space to deal with it, I said dryly.
Unfortunately, I do need you conscious to watch Worldhoppers, ART said.
I closed my eyes. So I'm out of luck until you finish coding that patch, huh?
And a bit past that, because I also happen to enjoy your commentary. That was probably bullshit. ART just wanted someone to hold its hand during the scary parts. Though, it added thoughtfully, I could take on most of your processes for a time. If all you need to be able to do is watch Worldhoppers.
I wasn't sure if ART was still joking. Then again, I wasn't sure if I was joking, either. Obviously, being almost completely unaware for however long wasn't ideal. Not to mention being unaware because someone other than me was taking over control of my brain. That was usually the nightmare scenario; I'd barely agreed to it before out of medical necessity.
But I did trust ART, and it had just established it wasn't fucking around with my trust. And before, when it was in my head and had partitioned me off so I could keep it together, that wasn't bad. I was, for fifteen seconds, surrounded by someone who both wanted to take care of me and was actually competent enough to do it, all while I was pressed too small to remember why it should have worried me.
Thinking about it made my organic parts—somewhere in my chest, specifically—do the same little squeeze they'd done when ART had told me it'd stay with me just because I wanted it to.
I said, Fuck it, sure.
ART paused for a fraction of a second, then activity kicked up behind its feed walls again. It seemed relieved—I think it was happy to have an actual direction to pursue, even if the direction was just "knock Murderbot out for a few hours". Alright, it said. Before that, though, I'd like to try something, if you're amenable. Nothing internal.
"Nothing internal" meaning "nothing in my brain", like I needed it to qualify that after the fight we’d just had. Is it going to bite me?
Don't be sarcastic, I'm not in the mood, ART said, tone dry. In our shared feed, it made a request to its own recycler system in my name and put it into progress. There was a blanket, one of the ones with the soft synthetic fabric that Turi had on their bed, slotted to pop out of the unit closest to the crew cabins in about five minutes.
I have a blanket, I told ART, gesturing to the bed like maybe it didn’t know what came standard in its own cabins: a duvet/comforter/whatever, a sheet underneath, two pillows, and an extra blanket. (Of course it knew: the duvet was monogrammed with its logo.)
I know, ART said. But this one will be warm and it’s specifically for you. To my understanding it triggers a serotonin release to wrap one around yourself. I've seen my crew do it. It's a small test I had in mind before we were derailed. Oh, right. I'd been so wrapped up in the whole governor module thing that I forgot ART had actually changed something in my head that we needed to check on.
As far as tests went, it could have been worse. I had used blankets for comfort before, even before I left the company (though that was the shock blanket in the emergency medkit and probably not going to give the cleanest data). Though I'd been in the cubicle with the shock blanket, and no one was staring at me the whole time judging how I felt about it. Mensah had seen me with it, yeah, but she'd had bigger issues to deal with at the time given the whole "crew member was just almost eaten by hostile fauna" thing.
So just sit there with the blanket while you watch me? I asked.
For one minute, ART said, while I gather data. Then I'll put you under like you wanted until some of the stress clears your system.
I wasn't sure if I liked that phrasing or not. Don't call it that, I told it, pausing Worldhoppers and sending the episode back to the beginning. You said you wouldn't make it weird.
I said I wouldn't give you an orgasm, ART reminded me. I would never promise not to "make it weird", because you find so many things "weird" that it's a fool's errand to try to navigate it. But I will find a different term.
I thought you weren't in the mood for sarcasm, I shot back. It was a relief ART was back to making fun of me. I barely tolerated it babying me when I was undergoing major repairs on its MedSys table.
Not for sarcasm, no, but there's never a bad time for pedantry, ART said. I rolled my eyes and got up to go get the blanket from the recycler.
ART dims and color-shifts its lights during the human rest period in keeping with the day-night cycle on New Tideland, in order to help preserve the crew's sleep schedules and their health when they're in a wormhole or out in deep space for weeks at a time. I don't sleep, though, and I don't need darkness for a recharge cycle, so the lights in my cabin are always kept bright. (Also, dimly-lit corridors make me nervous since AdaCol1, not that anyone needs to know that.)
It upped the light in the hallway anyway as I stepped out, which was nice of it. I'd been so deep in the feed for so long that it was almost jarring to be up and walking around. Even ART's meticulously clean halls felt out-of-focus and unfamiliar. I was really hoping none of the human crew members spotted me in the hallway and decided they wanted a conversation.
I flicked quickly through ART's cameras as I walked, trying to account for all the humans so I could at least brace myself. It was an odd hour of night, though, so the only one awake was Kaede, and she was just in the galley having a cup of hot liquid. Is that a stimulant? I asked ART.
Of course it's not a stimulant. It's tea. I haven't completely forgotten how to do my job.
Okay, well, I've seen Ratthi drink a whole cup of stimulant liquid and then immediately pass out for three hours. Human biology is fucked, I didn't need ART getting touchy about it. Luckily by then I was almost at the recycler, so I could just leave ART to throw whatever tantrum it was having instead of arguing with it again.
Down the hall I heard the recycler singing the little tone that means it's done with assembly and the requested item is in the pick-up slot. (The tone is a short and simplified version of PSUMNT's fight song for sporting events, because of course it is.
The first time I visited campus, I caught the full song in a recruitment ad on the feed and realized I'd heard it somewhere before; ART let me query my memory banks about it for a whole 45 minutes before it deigned to remind me where I’d first picked it up.)
I grabbed the blanket and spun on my heel to get back to my cabin. ART was in the media queue switching out Worldhoppers for episode 121 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, I guess as part of the experiment, and also doing a bunch of other stuff behind its feed wall that I couldn’t see. Its activity usually isn't super high during the human rest periods, even in wormhole space—it tracks everyone's sleep quality, sure, but it's not running requests or anything—so I had a feeling whatever it was doing had to do with me.
Setting up to hold all my processes, maybe. Though my consciousness was small enough it could probably do that without any effort at all.
I swung back into my cabin, setting the status on the door back to Do Not Disturb, then sat back down on my bed and pulled the blanket around my shoulders like I needed it for warmth the way I would with a medkit blanket. ART put a one-minute timer in our shared feed and started Sanctuary Moon.
And okay, yeah, I’ll admit it here: the blanket was nice. I don’t know if it set off whatever hormone reaction ART was expecting it to, but it was comforting and made me a little warmer than ART's optimized climate settings usually did. I pulled it tighter around me, so that it was putting pressure on the outsides of my arms, and that felt even better.
It was confusing that I was enjoying the feeling of being squeezed. I guess it helped that I was just doing it to myself, without other humans attaching connotations and emotions to it. Plus, if I needed to move quickly or I stopped liking it, I could just drop the blanket and it'd be over. But I did like it right now. It was a little bit like when you're in zero-grav for a while and then you walk into a ship and the artificial gravity kicks in, so all your limbs weigh what they're supposed to again.
Maybe this was what humans got out of hugging each other. (I’ve only ever hugged one human, and that was more for her benefit than mine. It’s not terrible if I like the human, but it weirds me out to be held in place, and until the blanket thing I’d never understood why being restrained like that is comforting for them.)
That was a thought. I squinted vaguely at the opposite wall. ART, is this supposed to be a hug?
You're welcome to think of it that way, ART said, given I don’t expect you to jump at the chance to test the modification by getting an actual hug from one of my crew members.
(In case it wasn't clear, that was ART-speak for Yes, but I'm embarrassed about it.)
The main goal here is to flush the stress hormones from your system, ART continued, not to run a complete test battery. I assume a proper battery would have to involve your Preservation humans, and a more neutral emotional state at initiation of testing.
I snorted. I didn't need ART to keep explaining it. "I'd hug you myself and get it over with if I could" would have worked just as well, and we both knew that's what it meant. I said, Thanks, ART.
ART paused for a fraction of a second. You're welcome.
The timer ticked down to zero and disappeared. ART didn't comment at all on whatever data it had collected during that time. Instead it said, You don't have to keep holding onto it if it's distracting.
No, I'm keeping the blanket, I said. I was still enjoying it, even if I did feel a little like I was using it as a shock blanket. Maybe I was wrong about the blankets being like hugs, and they were just all meant for adrenaline crash mitigation.
It's yours, ART said, so do what you want with it. At the same time, my visual scan cut out.
I startled and attempted to initiate a diagnostic, but ART took it away from me and it vanished behind ART's feed wall. …Oh, ART had been offloading processes from me the entire time we'd been talking about the blanket.
I was trying not to jar you too much, ART said, right on cue. I'm aware it's disconcerting to go from full awareness directly to none.
The unfortunate thing about that is that ART's usual hacking style has all the finesse of a hauler bot accident. I'd already been trying to think of how to convince it to consider learning a bit of subtlety. You almost had it until you took out my eyes, I told it. May need to change up the order you're cutting things in.
Noted, ART said. Sanctuary Moon seems to still be legible.
That was a question. Yeah, the inputs and the processors are separate because I also need to be able to interpret optical data.
I see. Now that I was paying attention, I could tell more of my awareness was disappearing. It still felt like being underwater, but closer to sinking than to having my head shoved under. And ART's partition for me was up from the start, this time, so I didn't have to put effort into holding myself together. Kind of like the isolation box.
But the isolation box was meant to keep me separate from ART's processors so I didn't spread contaminated code to it. I still kept everything that was inside my head, and had nothing outside of it. What we were doing right now was the complete opposite: I was running on ART's processors, more or less. Close enough that I could feel every shift in its activity and every passing emotion humming against my consciousness without the usual barrier of the feed wall.
My field of awareness narrowed down until it was just my tactile sensors (so I could still feel the blanket) and Sanctuary Moon and ART. I still felt like I was bracing for a fight, and I could tell that ART was too, but the reason why was slipping out of my short-term memory. I reached for the tension ART was holding instead, but ART must have caught me, because that dissipated as well.
What are you doing? it asked me. Its presence wound around me, amused. Is Sanctuary Moon not keeping your interest? We can find a different show.
Of course Sanctuary Moon was interesting. Don't be an asshole, I said, but I was pressing myself into the feeling of being surrounded at the same time. I wanted to think of it like a shield, like it could wrap me up so completely that nothing else could ever hurt.
I think the next upgrade you put in my cabin should be a big display surface, I told ART. Floor to ceiling.
I remembered seeing something like that once and liking it. I tried to grab for the memory file to clip and show ART an example, but it batted me away.
If I put a display surface in your room, my crew will never see you again, ART responded.
That was not true. I would still come out to do my job. I'm very practiced at putting away the media to do my job. Can I have one anyway?
We'll see. ART's amusement, warm and light, rang through every part of me. I figured we were going to be okay.
I settled in, turning my attention back to Sanctuary Moon. Very carefully, I loosened some of the focus I needed to hold myself together. I was expecting to start dissolving and braced to pull myself back really fast, but it wasn’t like that. ART was keeping me together with whatever partition it had set up, so whatever I didn’t hold onto just floated there. I unraveled slowly, waiting for it to get dangerous or start frightening me, but it didn’t.
I pulled myself back together just enough to ping ART. (Yeah, I don’t know why either.)
It pinged me back. I’ve got you.
Yeah, it did. I relaxed and let go.