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Nobody will ever convince me to go on vacation again.
I got sloppy. I got... complacent, if you can believe it. I guess I got too used to humans actually caring about other humans and caring if they died. Yeah, I know, it's stupid. I was also distracted by the waterpark. I was too concerned about the damn waterpark. I forgot to be concerned enough about the roller coasters. There were twelve humans and augmented humans on the Xtreme Death Spiral ride when the car came loose from the track at 80 miles per hour and forty meters in the air. And fuck it, fuck me, fuck everything and everyone forever, Amena was one of those twelve.
I didn't go on the rides. I didn't want to get strapped into anything, I didn't want to rocketed up in the air on an inescapable fast-moving rickety metal and synmat vehicle that someone else was operating fully out of my control. That didn't sound fun, that sounded nightmarish. But humans, apparently, think it's fun. Adolescent and young adult humans especially think it's fun. There were a lot of adolescent and young adult humans on the roller coaster car when it went into the eponymous Xtreme Death Spiral straight downward. I had actually been focusing more attention on the scanners posted around the park to make sure that no 1) weapons 2) unauthorized recording equipment 3) outside food or beverages had been brought inside (seeing as I was very much both (1) and (2), I was expending a not-insignificant amount of processing power on making sure none of those scanners noticed that) when I heard the ragged screech of metal shearing metal and the crack of mechanical parts breaking. They were followed, very quickly, by the screams of twelve humans.
My drones immediately dropped their sweep pattern and swarmed to give me a consgrtellation view of what was happening, but what was happening was happening so fast even I missed most of it. The pressure of the tightening spiral had caused the roller coaster car to come loose from the track. It was still moving fast, faster than any human had any right to go while still in the atmosphere, faster than even I could move, and the car went careening—and luckily, immediately crashed and mangled itself into the spiral structure of the ride, its freefall lasting only a fraction of a second before jamming sideways between the spiral track and the supports. I didn't know how many humans had been crushed when the car went flying and abruptly stopped flying. I didn't know which humans had been crushed. It had to be some of them, but I was already running, and my drones were zooming up to get a closer view of what was happening because they're not really built for distance work, and it would take at least thirteen seconds and possibly more for even the nearest drone to get up there. And the screaming was now being joined in by every human who had heard the crash and now was looking up and had finally processed what they were seeing.
The car hadn't fallen forty meters. Some humans up there were still screaming. There were survivors. Amena had been in the left section, and it was the right one that took the direct hit. It felt wrong and kind of disgusting to hope that some other humans had been the ones crushed in the excessive corporate mechanical failure, but. I had to hope Amena was one of the humans up there screaming. Because it was better than the alternative. I let myself feel a little bit petty that I was right, I was always right and no one ever listened to me, while I catapulted myself over the fence that was meant to keep out unauthorized humans, bolted to the support structure, and started climbing.
I had arrived back at the main campus on Mihira one cycle before Third Quarter Break.
Planetary years on Mihira are stupid long, so the university is broken into quarters. Obviously I’d never actually been to school (they don’t put SecUnits in colleges unless the students are protesting injustices and someone wants to make them stop by any means possible) but there are lots of longform serials set at secondary schools and universities. It’s a popular excuse to have young attractive actors play young attractive characters. Turns out they’re not very accurate.
I did know about school breaks, though. They’re a popular theme on shows.
They’re popular among real-life students too, evidently. The students I was with for the past were the nerds who applied to spend the quarter aboard ART, so a lot of them actually wanted to be there and were sad to have the quarter end, but we got back to Mihira Station one cycle before the break began and it was fucking packed.
The main university campus is on the planet of Mihira, but it’s hard to land wormhole-drive ships on planets (or, it’s not that hard to land, but it’s really hard to take off again), so Mihira Station in orbit was the planet’s primary spaceport. This is normal—Mihira actually has two more stations that act as spaceports, one reserved exclusively for government and academic stuff, unlike Preservation that only had the one for everything. But the creatively named Mihira Station is the one that most people would use if, for example, they were evacuating the whole fucking planet for threat reasons, which is what I assumed was happening because the departure areas of the station were a swarming mess.
Threat Assessment rose sharply, and I guess I must have shown it, because ART pinged me. Do you see something wrong?
Did it not? Is this normal?
It’s Third Quarter Break, ART said, like that explained everything.
Yeah, the semester is over, I know that, that’s why we’re here. But is it supposed to be like this?
Last year when GoldenAdventure Park opened its new ride it was worse.
ART was not concerned, and none of the students spilling out of ART’s main airlock onto the station concourse were concerned either. Sad to leave, but excited and not acting like this was weird at all.
This many people in a mass uncontrolled throng was stressful to me even if it wasn’t to anyone else. I grumbled to Art. It poked me in the feed. Threat Assessment ticked back down.
This was only the second time I’d actually ever been to Mihira (and I hadn’t even disembarked when we stopped briefly at New Tideland before leaving the system at the beginning of the semester), so it was still new, and new things played havoc with Risk Assessment and Threat Assessment and I didn’t like it. It’s different when it’s… you know, a job, a mission, something that’s supposed to be scary and dangerous. This was new in a way that wasn’t supposed to be dangerous and frustratingly, irrationally, I liked it way less.
I did tell you we were coming back for Third Quarter Break.
I don’t know what the fuck that means and you know it.
It’s the two week break after the third quarter.
Thanks. Amazing.
ART pulled up the Spring Break episode of the bad serial Starshine Academy. It said, dryly, It’s that.
Fuck, I hope not.
Usually it’s less fraught and there is less property destruction, yes.
How would you know, you’re a spaceship, I grumbled.
If it helps, the university itself will be quiet. Most students travel to Lake Oji, or to New Tideland or Turqezia.
That was something to look forward to, all the adolescent humans being rowdy somewhere else. (It still made me more stressed than I wanted to think about.) I wondered if I could just stay aboard ART, or at least skulk around Mihira Station for two weeks. Realistically, I’d just keep doing what I’d spent most of my time aboard ART doing—there hadn’t been any serious security concerns—but it was… different. When there wasn’t a job to do.
You can get a break too, you know, ART said.
Oh, fuck off. What would I even do? I don’t want to go skinny dipping in a mountain lake or whatever humans do on academic break.
Many go to the amusement park on Turqezia.
That sounds just as bad.
You can probably guess where I ended up spending Third Quarter Break, because of course I did.
The thing was, Amena wanted to go to GoldenAdventure Park. And that was, of course, fucking terrifying.
“It’s fine,” she huffed, when I predictably freaked out. “Everyone goes to the park on Third Quarter Break! It’s like a tradition!”
“People dying at GoldenAdventure Park is also a tradition.”
“It is not!”
I showed her news reports about six different deaths at the GoldenAdventure Water World that yes I had just searched up in the feed right then.
Amena deleted them out of her feed space irritably. “That doesn’t count! That’s the waterpark. Not the rides. It’s different.” Then she betrayed me by saying, “ART, tell SecUnit it’s fine.”
Students spend Third Quarter Break at GoldenAdventure Park every year, and there have never been any reported injuries more severe than sunburn, twisted ankles, or food poisoning, ART also betrayed me by saying.
“It sounds like a death trap,” I said.
“You’ve never been to an amusement park,” Amena said. “You only know about them from media.”
“You haven’t been either,” I said.
“Yeah, but lots of my classmates have gone! And they’re going. And I’m going with them. It’s going to be fun.”
Her arms were folded and she was glaring now—not directly at me, but sort of at my shoulder, because she wasn’t going to be rude even though she was annoyed.
And it wasn’t like I didn’t get it. Amena couldn’t go home for Third Quarter Break like a lot of students from within the system did. Preservation was fifteen cycles away. By the time she got there, classes would have already started again.
I knew it was hard for her to even talk about this with anyone other than me. Not even emotionally hard—Preservation humans love to talk about their emotions—but actually hard. A lot of first-year classes at the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland were taught in Nev Ispangi, the most common language in this part of the Corporation Rim, but the native language of Mihira and a solid chunk of New Tideland was Naichi, and they required that anyone who didn’t speak it enroll in Naichi classes for their first year of university. A lot of upper-level classes were taught entirely in Naichi. Amena had learned some Nev Ispangi in school growing up, but her first language was Bahasa ‘rabiyy, which absolutely nobody speaks besides Preservationers. Something something Pressy, I made the mistake of bringing it up around Thiago once on that boat and got a big long lecture about creoles and Pressy history and shit that I stopped listening to both because it was irrelevant and Thiago annoyed me. But it meant that Amena’s whole social life was conducted in languages she didn’t speak all that well. Feed interfaces can do a lot of translation, but it’s kind of awkward and not all that great at keeping up when a conversation is moving fast. I was the only other person on Mihira who she could speak in Bahasa ‘rabiyy to. (There aren’t a lot of advantages to being a construct, but one of them is that I can just download language modules into my brain and immediately know the language. I’ve gotten told that my accent sounds like I learned Bahasa ‘rabiyy out of a cheap feed module, which I did, so. I don’t interact directly with Amena a lot during the semester, and not at all when I’m working the semester-in-space aboard ART and she’s taking classes on Mihira, but even though I’ve been away from Preservation for several months now, I don’t like to put the Bahasa ‘rabiyy language module back into storage; for one thing, Dr. Mensah, Ratthi, Bharadwaj, Pin-Lee, Arada, Volescu, and various Mensah children keep sending me Preservation media they think I might like).
“It’s my first Third Quarter Break,” Amena said, “and I want to do something fun that everyone else does just fine. I can’t be the only one who just sits around and doesn’t go anywhere! I can’t be like, the stupid freeholder who’s afraid of rollercoasters!”
I still didn’t want her to go. Couldn’t she go to that mountain cabin ART talked about, or something? But it wasn’t like I could actually tell Amena what to do. “Fine,” I said. “I’m going too then.”
“Oh come on, SecUnit.”
“You can do whatever,” I said, “and so can I. Maybe I want to go now too.”
“Do you?”
“No.” But making sure Amena didn’t drown in a wavepool or something was a way better use of my time than pacing around Mihira Station for two weeks driving myself crazy with nothing to do. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s go to GoldenAdventure Park.”
I did not like GoldenAdventure Park.
It was down on the planet, for one thing. Immediate strike against it. There are two inhabitable planetary systems in the star system, and one sorta-inhabitable one. The people who settled New Tideland and then Mihira got the good ones, and when the corporations came in later, they set up around the less-good one. Most corporate citizens in the star system live on the big station orbiting Turquezia; the planet’s atmosphere can support humans, but it’s not good to breathe for long periods of time.
Which meant the surface of the planet was 98% farmland for growing the genetically engineered crops that fed the station residents (inhabited by ag-bots and farm employees who the corporations didn’t give a crap about their health anyway), and 2% GoldenAdventure Park.
ART docked at EstrAzraea Station. Through the big windows I could see Turquezia down below, and didn’t like it.
(I’d whined and ART had whined and Seth relented and let ART be used as a “University provided transport to Turquezia for students on break!” I don’t know how he justified that but I didn’t want to be on this planet alone.)
Been a while, hasn’t it? ART said privately to me.
Yeah. It had. This was the first station I’d gone to after I left Port FreeCommerce, when I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. It was where I’d met ART in the first place. If I felt weird and restless now, it was nothing to how little I had any clue what I was doing back then.
Yeah, was all I said back.
I herded the students out of ART towards the shuttles down to the planet. It felt weird to be here, and for the first time in my life I wanted to get off the station and down to the planet.
Well, no. I wanted to get off the station. The planet was bad in other ways.
ART rode my feed down to the planet as I wrangled Amena and her university friends Chika and Jon and Ìfémi and Sunny, doubled back for Máire who got lost and Yakubu and Saraki who were trying to sneak away to gamble or something, and directed all the students who’d come aboard ART to the designated and very busy shuttles down to the park.
The park itself was even bigger than I’d expected, and I hated it.
There were so many humans. I’ve been in transit rings, I’ve been stationed in mines, I’ve been to Preservation festivals and underground colonies, but I’d never been in the middle of so many humans before. Third Quarter Break was a big part of it—university students swarmed the games, the rides, the food stalls—but there were also plenty of adults with very young juvenile humans, and a constant wave of colors and sounds and smells that felt like a physical attack. The air smelled like fried foods and chemicals and water disinfectant. The games beeped and the lights flashed, and rides—oh the rides looked awful. They dropped humans from absurd heights, swung them upside-down dozens of meters in the air, shot them across rattling tracks at speeds that would turn every organ in their bodies to very painful mush if a single thing went wrong. One roller coaster was entirely upside-down. And the humans seemed to be having a great time regardless, because they were screaming but in the excited way humans do when they are having fun and decide to scream for no reason.
My performance reliability went into freefall, crashing to 94%. Not even because there was anything wrong, there was just so much of it.
I hate this, I said to ART.
I know.
Where’s the quietest place in the park?
ART pulled up the park directory and dropped three markers on the map. I scrambled to the nearest one, hiding near a tent that had someone who could read your fortune in stars or rocks or something. One good thing about the mass of people was that nobody looked twice at me.
Hiding behind the fortune teller tent helped, a little. I focused on the limited ranges of input from my drones, keeping them high and out of the way, surveying the park and Amena’s friend group.
I stayed there for most of the day, monitoring the park security features and making sure they didn’t monitor me, and watching Amena and her friends go on rides that made my threat assessment spike every time. They had to take off their feed interfaces for most rides, too, park policy so they wouldn’t fly out of their ears and get lost or bean someone in the head or whatever, but it was not helping my stress levels to not be able to contact her until each ride was over. At least she seemed to have been unnerved by the newsfeed reports I showed her, because she didn’t go to the waterpark.
The fucking waterpark.
That did not help my feelings at fucking all when I saw, heard, and felt the Xtreme Death Spiral crash.
Climbing up the roller coaster was harder than it looked. I gripped my hands around vertical supports almost as wide around as my torso, wedging my reinforced fingernails into the seams.
A lot of humans on the ground were screaming. Not in the fun way now. Humans do that a lot before they figure out what to actually do. ART pressed up against my feed, intensely bearing down on me and my drones, almost overwhelming me as I was already struggling up the ride.
My drones shot up to assess the roller coaster riders. Two looked dead already, mangled in the crash. Everyone else was in various states of abject terror, which, yeah no shit. Amena was in the back left row, looking also terrified but alert and not crushed to death in a disaster of corporate negligence and SecUnit complacence. That was good. That was okay. I could get to her.
The roller coaster was a rickety structure of metal and synmat beams and struts holding up an actual physical track, not even maglev, this shit was on rails. Up close, it looked even less reliable than it looked from the ground. When was the last time this thing was serviced? Paint flaked off the metal when I stepped on the crossbars, and the synmat parts ground against each other under my hands when I gripped the joints between struts to pull myself up.
They were spaced far apart, definitely not meant for climbing. I stretched my arm up to grab the next strut, braced my foot against an angled support beam, and my boot failed to find a grip and I almost plunged twenty meters to the ground. (Us SecUnits can take a lot, but that one would have really hurt.) I lost the inputs from two of my drones and they fell out of the air. I was not gonna be getting those back. My fingers were nearly wrenched out of their sockets as they suddenly became my only point of contact with anything solid. There were some gasps and screams from below me—okay, they were definitely paying attention to me now. Oh I really could not focus on how many people were staring at me.
I swung back around, straining my wrist (and really really hoping it wouldn’t separate from my arm). I grabbed the main support beam and wrapped my arm around it to brace myself, and scrambled with my legs to get purchase again. I glanced down—bad idea—but let myself let go and slide back down the pole to the next crossbeam joint below. I landed with a slight jolt after one meter of sliding—good that I judged that right and the crossbeam was right there. That gave me enough stability to untwist, rebalance myself, and scramble with my feet to kick off my boots. I had to waste 3.1 seconds reaching down to unlace my left boot before I could pry it off. It fell to the ground. It fell pretty far.
With my left foot free, I unfolded it to its full extent and used it to tear my right boot off too. Those seconds wasted seemed to stretch for hours as I fumbled with the material and kicked it free. But now I could grip the beams and struts so much better. I dug my inorganic toes into the seams and rivets of the synmat beam and rocketed upward.
Hand over hand, feet digging into the frankly terrifyingly loose joints of the support structure, it took 11.6 more seconds to get up to where the humans were trapped.
They had been watching me climb, wide-eyed. They were facing downward, held into their seats by their harnesses, all their weight on the safety restraints. They had nothing else to look at, just the ground, the panicking mess of humans on it, and me climbing up the roller coaster towards them. Some shrieked at me as I drew closer, yelling in confusion and yelling for help in a clashing mix of languages. One of them broke through the noise—Amena, yelling down to me, “SecUnit!”
Which, it turns out, was a really bad thing to yell when there were ten living humans and two dead ones and the roller coaster was teetering precariously in a death corkscrew and everybody was freaking out already.
You can tell exactly what humans think about SecUnits, because none of the humans who heard Amena yell “SecUnit” thought that meant “oh, a SecUnit is coming to save us because it is a competent security professional,” they thought “oh shit I didn’t think my day could get any worse but that would do it!” and they started screaming and thrashing even more. Which was the exact worst thing they could possibly be doing.
I was here to save them, and they were afraid to see me.
Fine. Take your own chances with the synmat death trap about to fall and crush you all. I didn’t care.
“I’m here to help,” I told the panicking human in front of me. They were squirming in their safety restraints, blood leaking all over the solid harness, blubbering and trying to kick at me. “I’m going to get you down from here. I can help you if you calm down.”
It didn’t exactly seem to get through to the human. They looked adolescent, kind of like Dr. Mensah’s younger son after Amena. Adolescents are not very good at calming down.
Amena was doing a better job than most. Hanging against her shoulder restraints about eight meters up from me, she was patting the arm of the girl next to her, Chika from the university, who was completely losing it again, and telling her, in a strained voice and stumbling Naichi, “Calm, calm, It’s okay, it’s my friend, it wants to help, it is coming to help, calm—”
The imperative form is the infinitive + “yah,” ART said in my feed connection, as if that was helpful right now.
I did not pass on this information. Instead I raised my voice and said, “Amena! Are you okay?”
She called down to me, voice shaky, answering me in Nev Ispangi, “Yeah! I’m okay.” Then added, back in Bahasa ‘rabiyy, “Is there anyone official coming, or do you have it under control?”
“No idea,” I called back, and realized I was still running Nev Ispangi. I switched back over to the Bahasa ‘rabiyy module and repeated, “I don’t know. Who knows what the park’s emergency response protocol is. I think I’m the only one here right now.”
It helped that no one else on the ride understood me.
Amena could have freaked out at that, but she was keeping remarkably under control. “Okay.”
I needed to get her out of here before she realized just how much she should be freaking out. I mean, I was really glad she wasn’t, because the more humans freak out the harder it is to rescue them, and telling them this never helps (nothing you tell humans helps much) but the metal of the rollercoaster car was making really unpleasant noises against the synmat supports and who knew how long it would hold up or when it would just give out.
Amena could not be on the car when it gave out.
But clambering up towards her over the other humans was not a great idea, either.
Amena was in the last row, left side—the least damaged area, luckily, but the furthest from me. I couldn’t get her out first.
Well, I had to get all these humans out, anyway. I could already feel the way the roller coaster car was shifting under me, the supports not meant to take the full unmitigated momentum of the car hitting it even if they had been maintained properly.
Switching back to Nev Ispangi again to talk to the human in front of me, I said, “I’m going to need to get you out of your seat. Is that okay?”
They stared at me. There was blood on their face and their eyes were dark and huge. But they nodded, trembling.
I tried to connect to the restraint system. And learned it wasn’t feed-integrated.
Fuck’s sake.
ART, I can’t move the restraints, I said. How do they open?
ART finally had something it could help with, and it flooded my feed as much as it could from the spacedock. It dropped all the Xtreme Death Spiral building schematics and records on me, which I really did not have time to go through, but it knew that and it highlighted the thing it wanted me to look at. It said, Two decades ago there were concerns about terrorist hacking of ride restraints, so all newer rides require a physical short-range key at the embarkation/disembarkation point to release the restraints.
Fucking great. I asked, Can you spoof it?
Of course I can spoof it, ART said. Given time to reverse engineer it.
How much time?
It paused just long enough to let me know the answer would be “too long.”
I don’t know, ART said. I’ll start.
Yeah, too long. I would have to do something else.
“I’m going to physically remove the restraint holding you in,” I told the human. “Don’t be scared. It isn’t going to hurt you. It might look and sound kind of scary, but the restraints are locking you in, and I need to disable them so that I can get you down from here safely.”
I opened my gunports.
All the humans, predictably, screamed again. Amena started shouting over them, mostly in Naichi for the fellow university students around her, “Calm! Calm! It’s my friend! It’s helping! It’s helping! It’s my friend and it’s helping you!”
“I’m going to break the lock,” I told the human in front of me who was now struggling again. I pressed my energy weapons against the locking mechanism at the top of the overhead restraints, trying to get at the lock while also not pointing the weapon at the adolescent’s head because that would not have helped things right now, and sent an energy pulse through the rigid synmat harness and fried the actual lock that held it in place.
The human lurched as the safety restraint gave way, but barely had time to scream again before I grabbed them and hauled them over to the stable support beams.
The human clung to me, whimpering and looking at the forty meter drop below, and I realized kind of too late that I didn’t have anywhere to put them. I was balancing on a crossbeam, one hand clutching the rescued human and the other gripping the vertical supports, and there wasn’t a good place to safely put them down. Climbing up to the flat section of track while holding a panicking, shaking human would be next to impossible; putting them down on a crossbeam would absolutely just mean one of them panicked and fell. I would need to bring them all the way down, and then climb all the way back up.
Which, ten times… I didn’t know how long that would take. The energy weapon blast, the squirming humans, me crawling all over the wedged car, it was putting too much strain on the supports and they were buckling. I needed to get to Amena. But I had to get the other humans out of the way first.
Gripping the human with one hand, I said, “Hold on tight, and don’t be scared. They were gripping me hard enough that it was barely necessary, but they tightened their grip even further and squeaked as I dropped down to the next crossbeam below.
Jumping down from beam to beam was at least a lot faster than going up had been.
Humans were swarming the roller coaster on the ground; my drones, watching the rest of the ride, alerted me that what looked like a rescue crew was finally starting to climb the access ladder on the other side of the ride. It would take her time (too much time) to actually get over here and do anything helpful. I stopped on the lowest-most support crossbeam two meters off the ground, and gently tried to peel the adolescent human off me. They did not want to let go.
“You’re safe now,” I said. “Drop down to the ground, the humans are right there, they’ll catch you. You’re safe, you just need to drop down.”
Thjey loosened their arms, hesitantly. Two meters is basically nothing, I’m two meters tall (well, not exactly, not anymore. Two centimeters less. You know.) but not being on solid ground, the kid did not want to let go.
There were humans on the ground shouting and reaching up at me. When the human in my arms felt the hands of other humans grasping them, I think it helps. They let go, and I lowered them into the arms of the human crowd.
They were grasping at me, too. I kicked their hands away and bolted back up.
The climb back up was easier. I knew what I was doing. But I could feel the seconds ticking in my internal clock. It was all taking too fucking long.
When I got back up to the crashed car, the humans were panicking a lot less. Not none, but less. They saw me rescue one of them. They realized what I was here to do. Amena had been spending the time repeating in Nev Ispangi and Naichi that I was her friend, that I was here to help, that I was good and strong and brave and wasn’t scared. (I think she meant wasn’t scary, but she didn’t know the Naichi word for “scary” and only remembered “scared” but it was close enough. She was getting her point across, and by not freaking out she was helping her friends from the University at least also not freak out.)
I crawled up the spiral and faced the second human up. They looked a little bit older, an adult and not an adolescent, but not by much. They were blinking and shaking a lot and looked dazed. If Medcenter Argala was at all accurate (and who knew if it was), this human probably had shock or a concussion or something like it.
“I’m here to help,” I said, trying to sound soothing. “I’m going to get you down safely, just like the last person.”
I couldn’t fully tell if this human followed what I said, but they only flinched and didn’t scream or squirm when I used my energy weapon to break their restraint’s lock. When I grabbed them, they shuddered a lot, and couldn’t really move their arms well to hold on to me; yeah, either shock or some sort of neck injury. Medcenter Argala was very clear in many, many episodes that you shouldn’t move people with potential neck or back injuries because you could make it worse, but in most of those episodes they ended up having to anyway because of imminent danger and other plot contrivances, so as a medical lesson, it wasn’t one of their better-taught ones. But neck injury or not, I did need to move this human, because their injuries would get much, much worse if the coaster car fell.
I held onto them firmly as I dropped down the beams. When I got to the lowest one, there were more humans, who had realized what I was doing and were crowding the roller coaster to help, despite the frantic warnings of the park staff to get away.
“This one has a neck injury or a concussion,” I called down to the humans in the crowd as I passed the dazed and shaking rider down to them. I think they were careful. I didn’t really stop to check. Once the human was out of my hands and was being supported by the crowd, I was on my way back up.
It’s hard to be gentle and fast at the same time. I was trying to be both but every creak the roller coaster made, every sheared beam and bent joint I stepped on to climb up the precariously hanging car, was a reminder that I had no idea how much time I had left.
The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth humans were in varying states of shock and injury, but most seemed with it enough to listen to my instructions and hold on to me with a minimum of flipping out. They realized I was here to help them. They realized I was rescuing them. They realized they were going to be safe. The humans on the ground were starting to try to yell up to me, which I ignored, and the park employee who had climbed up the ladder ran along the tracks to look down at me and ask, voice trembling, “Is there… anything I can do to help?”
“Not really,” I called up to her in Nev Ispangi, while I freed the sixth rider and pulled them from their seat. “You should get down or at least strap into something. This car is going to fall.”
ART alerted me that the park was clearing people out of the roads so that they could send rescue vehicles and were activating some maintenance bots to try and help with the rescue. Things were going the way they should in an emergency situation, and the humans who were freaking out were staying out of the way and the humans who were in charge were now mostly finished freaking out and were actually doing something! This never goes this well!
Then I climbed back up to find the seventh human rider’s arm was trapped in the mangled coaster machinery.
This one was definitely in shock, shaking and making small noises in their throat. Blood covered everything—the human, their clothes and hair, the restraint, the spiral track crushing their forearm and the roller coaster car it was crushed against.
I would not be able to get them out of that.
I didn’t think anything would be able to get them out of that.
Climbing around on the car this high up towards the back was making the whole thing grind and groan in a way I really did not like. There wasn’t time to spare, and the human’s arm was so mangled I wasn’t sure if there was any saving it anyway. So I said, in Naichi, as calmly as I could, “Hey. Hey. Can you look at me?”
The human did. Their eyes were blank and scared.
“I’m going to get you out of there,” I said, gently and evenly, as I opened my gunports and activated my energy weapon. “You’re going to be okay. Just keep looking at me. I got you, and then I’ll bring you back down.”
They looked at me, nodding a little, listening.
I fired directly into their elbow.
The seventh human screamed; the rest of the riders gasped or screamed or shouted, the trust they had settled into immediately evaporating because they just watched a fucking SecUnit shoot someone’s arm off.
And then they all screamed for a different reason because the energy burst must have hit something structural, and the car lurched as something broke underneath it. I frantically grabbed onto the blood-slick car as it shuddered and dropped another three meters, screeching and listing, grinding against the supports.
The human in front of me was crying. I didn’t bother to say anything else. I dialed down the energy weapon’s power, broke the lock, pulled them free, and started climbing down.
I didn’t acknowledge the human commotion at the base of the ride. The humans who had basically settled into a helpful crowd when I was doing well were getting frantic and scared and angry again, running and shouting, demanding things at me. I just handed the seventh rider down to someone who looked like they were not losing their head, and said, “It’s going to fall. Get ready to run.” I wiped my hands on my pants to try to get some of the slippery blood off my palms, then grimaced and climbed back up.
The eighth human tried to squeeze away from me as I got near them, crowding to the back of the seat as if that was able to put any more than a few centimeters between me and them. Fine. If I could be gentle or fast, if I could be a friendly rescuer or a scary SecUnit, then my job was to get these humans out of this death trap no matter what they felt about it.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” I gritted out, as I aimed my gunport and they started crying too. “I’m just breaking the lock to get you out of here.”
I did. I grabbed them. I slipped on the way down because my hands had more blood on them than I thought. I managed to catch myself and I don’t think the human could have gotten any more scared, anyway.
I grimaced and climbed back up. I’m mostly not powered by organic muscles, but my joints were starting to ache and my arms starting to protest, and my performance reliability was slowly ticking down point by point. 85% and wavering.
There were only two humans left alive up there, and Amena was coming down and getting to safety now.
Clambering up the car made it grind and lurch even more. ART tried to send me a model of the roller coaster car and tracks with estimates of forces and a path highlighted for me to climb to minimize its movement. I don’t know where it got that. I imagined ART up at the station dock, crunching numbers, iterating physics models, trying to come up with something helpful it could do from so far away.
I followed it. I don’t know if it helped.
Finally, though, I could face Amena directly. Her normally deep brown face was ashy looking, but the tension in her arms and shoulders slackened a little when I got to her.
I raised my arm to break her restraints and get her out of there, when her friend next to her completely lost it.
“Don’t!” she wailed, tears streaming down her cheeks and twisting as much as she could in her seat to reach toward Amena. Before I could snap that I wasn’t going to hurt her or anything, I was saving them both, the friend continued, completely panicking, “Don’t leave me! It’s going to fall! I don’t want to be alone, don’t leave me up here alone!”
“I’ll get you,” I said, but the friend was reaching for me now, scrambling for anything solid to hold onto. I don’t think she heard me, or was able to understand anything anyone said to her anymore, anyway. She was right. The car was going to fall.
“I will come back for you,” I said. “I promise. I’m not leaving you.”
She was barely audible through her tears. “Don’t leave me up here alone.”
“Can you get us both at the same time?” Amena asked.
“Not climbing,” I told her. “Especially not climbing this.”
She swallowed, and then said, with a surprisingly steady voice, “Get Chika first.”
“No.”
“It’ll go faster and be easier if you just do!”
“Amena—”
“SecUnit, please, just do it!”
There wasn’t time. I’m good at arguing, I’ve gotten really good at it, but there wasn’t time to fight a panicking human getting in the way of getting herself and her supposed friend rescued.
I hated it. I hated this.
I said, “Fine.”
Moving as fast as I could, I broke the lock on Chika’s restraint and grabbed her, hauled her away from the spiral track, and started dropping downward as fast as I could without freefalling completely. She screamed and clung onto me like a vice. I did my best to ignore it.
She didn’t seem injured, just out of her mind with panic, so I pried her off me and dropped her the last two meters to the ground. “Run,” I said, and started back upwards without looking to see if she did. (She probably did. There were still some humans who rushed up to help and others who hovered back to yell at her and me. Someone would get her.)
My fingers, wrists, and elbows hurt in a way dialing down my pain sensors didn’t fix. They were sore and strained and I had to ignore it because I was so fucking close. Performance reliability was at 83% and falling, and risk assessment was going haywire.
ART, I said, does the park have a broadcast system, and is it connected to the feed?
Even needing to go through a planetary relay, ART found the answer quicker than I would. It does, it is, and it’s mine now.
Good. Make an announcement that the Xtreme Death Spiral car is going to fall and all humans need to get away from it right now.
I could feel ART surging through the feed. It finally had something to do.
I didn’t stop to listen to ART’s announcement. Whatever it decided to say would be good enough. I gripped the roller coaster supports with shaking fingers and dragged myself back up to the car.
Climbing over the rows of seats to get to Amena was making the car shift under me and the supports holding it up buckle and shear. Amena yelped and then put her hand over her mouth as the car lurched down another meter.
I hauled myself up to where she was dangling in her seat. I didn’t bother to say anything. With one more blast of energy weapon fire, I broke the lock on her restraint, swung it up, and she reached out to me at the same time as I grabbed hold of her.
That shift in weight was the last straw that caused the car to snap the piece of track holding it up completely.
“Hold on!” I yelled, as if Amena was going to do anything else. Yet more screams rose from the crowd below us (when would these humans stop screaming?) I held Amena tightly in one hand, gripped onto the careening car with the other as it plummeted towards the ground, and once we were clear of the Death Spiral, threat assessment and risk assessment both blaring in my brain, I crouched and leapt across the gap to the main support structure.
The crash dropped my performance reliability by 16% and I almost went into forced restart right then and there. I twisted my body to make sure I took the brunt of the hit and not Amena, but I didn’t manage to get a grip on the crossbeam. I grabbed at it too late, and fell.
Amena held her breath and pressed her face into my hoodie.
The air whipped past me in a screaming rush. I reached out and caught hold of the next support beam three meters down from that, scrambled to get my feet under me, and swung down to land most of my weight at the intersection of the X-shaped cross-supports two and a half meters beneath that. Which, ow. But I was able to hold on to the beam without yanking my hand clean off, and I don’t have a lot of sensors on my feet so I would deal with that later. Amena tightened her hands around me as we jolted to that ungainly stop, but she didn’t let go and I didn’t drop her.
We both stared at the roller coaster car with the two dead humans still strapped in their seats come to a deafening crash that shook the whole structure beneath us. Amena went eep and pressed closer against me—then after a moment mumbled “Sorry” and attempted to disentangle herself from me.
“It’s a rescue situation,” I said, not letting go. “It’s fine.”
“I guess,” Amena said. She looked at the heap of metal and synmats on the ground, broken and jutting at weird angles like a crushed insect or broken drone. “Um. Thanks.”
“It’s my job,” I said.
“It’s vacation,” said Amena. “It isn’t your job. You’re just paranoid.”
“It’s always my job,” I said. “Would you prefer I wasn’t paranoid?”
Amena looked guiltily back down at the wreck of the coaster car. “Not today,” she admitted. “I just… I just wanted to do something fun, you know? Normal college things, like everyone else. Without being treated like a little kid who always needs to be watched and fussed over and saved. When do I get to feel like a grown-up? When do I get to be trusted to do stuff? And I thought… I thought if everything went fine on this trip, you’d stop acting like I can’t take care of myself. And it didn’t.”
“If it helps,” I said, “I also have to rescue the adults in your family from way more foreseeable problems all the time. Like your Uncle Thiago trying to talk to those raiders.”
That made her smile. “Yeah. True.”
“Being in danger because of shitty corporate cost cutting doesn’t make you not an adult,” I said. Then, I added, awkwardly, because ART was prodding me in the feed to say more emotional stuff because Amena was scared and looking for reassurance and still not wearing her feed interface so I was the only one who could communicate with her right now, “You did a good job, up there. Staying calm and keeping everyone else calm. If everyone had been panicking the whole time it would have made rescuing them all a lot harder. You really helped.”
“And using the stuff from Naichi class in the real world,” she said.
“Yeah. Staying calm and keeping everyone else calm not even in your native language. It was good.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately.”
“I guess we’re both trying to figure it out, being here at the university by ourselves,” she said. “I’m sorry I got mad at you for wanting to come.”
I did not know what to say to that.
So instead I said, “Looks like it’s safe to climb down. Hold on.”
“Okay,” she said. “For rescue reasons.”
“Yeah.”
I climbed down carefully, now that the time pressure was over and I had the luxury of picking my handholds and footholds. ART told me I should get my joints looked at in its medsystem because I just put a lot of strain on them and it could see all the warning flags my structural integrity systems were throwing. I didn’t even argue. They hurt.
Of course, I had to figure out how to get back to ART. There were a lot of people milling around on the ground now that the danger had passed and everyone wanted to know what the fuck had actually happened. And there was no way to hide that I was a very illegal SecUnit.
Park security was there to meet me when I deposited Amena on the ground. Several humans and two bots swarmed around me immediately. “SecUnit!” one of the humans yelled at me, clearly afraid. “Stand down!”
I felt the weight of everything crash over me. Now that all the humans were safe, I was tired and had no patience for this. I saved ten of their park visitors. The least they could do was look less upset about seeing me.
“I don’t answer to you,” I snapped, and turned to walk away. Which I couldn’t do because there were more security personnel surrounding me. Fuck’s sake.
“Where did you come from?” demanded the human who I assumed was in charge here. “How did you get here?”
“Leave it alone!” Amena shouted at him. “It saved all of us, and this is how you treat it?”
“Not now,” I muttered, because this was gearing up to be another protracted lawsuit at the absolute best and if more security showed up could turn into a firefight at the worst, but I didn’t really have any plans for what to actually do until ART poked my feed. I have an idea.
I looked at the script it sent me. Oh. This was actually really similar to a thing they did in the show Anchorage a lot when the heist team needed to get into or out of somewhere they shouldn’t be. ART and I both really liked that serial, we watched all five seasons together, I should have thought of that. (I had a lot of other things on my mind.)
“S-secUnit—” the security human said, looking like he didn’t know what to do either.
“I am a SecUnit contracted to GoldenDoro Corporation Administration, sent to monitor park security,” I said.
“What? No you’re not, we don’t use SecUnits in parks!” But he definitely didn’t sound sure.
“I’m for monitoring park security,” I said again. “The Xtreme Death Spiral has not undergone its mandated maintenance verification for the last four years. It is meant to undergo maintenance verification every two GoldenDoro years, but it was just checked off and not actually performed for the last two.” Thanks, ART. It was doing a bunch of documentary research while I was climbing up and down the collercoaster. Also, holy shit, GoldenAdventure Park. “GoldenDoro Upper Management sends undercover SecUnits to its parks periodically without informing park operations in order to assess security at the park and to be on hand to rescue any humans—”
They call park visitors ‘distinguished guests, ART said.
“—distinguished guests who may be put in danger by slips in safety,” I said.
The security human had turned pale. “Are… are you going to report this?”
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t stop me.”
“SecUnit,” the security human called after me, “Don’t—don’t report this! I order you!”
“I don’t answer to you,” I said again. I walked away, and this time no human tried to stop me. “Also, this is going to be all over the newsfeeds and social feeds really soon anyway.”
Are they going to believe that? I asked ART as I left the park.
Maybe they won’t, ART said, But no GoldenAdventure Park in the galaxy is going to skip maintenance verifications anymore, no matter how time-consuming and expensive they are.
Good. I picked up the pace, entered the shuttle dock, and immediately ducked into a bathroom because no matter how bad they smell I needed to get into a place where humans would stop looking at me. Maybe I could wait here until the next shuttle up to the station came. Did you delete all the security footage of me?
Do I look like an amateur? ART retorted.
Thanks.
After a few minutes of just standing facing the wall and turning my breathing as slow as it could go (this bathroom was gross), I got a ping from Amena saying that she got her feed interface back, and also that they were gonna be asking her and everyone on the ride a bunch of questions and give them medical checkups.
Don’t sign anything or agree to pay for anything, I told her.
Yeah, no kidding. I don’t know who’s going to sue them, but they’re going to get sued really hard. We’re getting medical care now. But we all just want to leave as soon as we can.
Please.
ART was listening. I didn’t try to stop it. It said, This wasn’t the vacation I had in mind.
At least I know what to do here. I wouldn’t know what to do on a break anyway.
That’s something we should probably work on, ART said. You don’t need to be doing a job at all times.
Whatever. Also clearly yes I do.
Some scenarios are unexpected, ART said. That’s a failure on my part, too. I didn’t do enough research to assess the park’s safety. But you can rest now. Mihiran and New Tidelander lawyers have been notified. They will receive the message in about 34 minutes and be here in 4 to 6 hours. After that, they’ll be able to take over.
So I’m still security for the next 4 to 6 hours.
And then you can take your own break, ART said.
I’ll try.
It pushed our media queue to our shared feed. Until then, do you want to pick up where we left off in Rule of Vultures, or…
Let’s go back to season 8 of Sanctuary Moon, I said. I cannot pay attention to Rule of Vultures right now.
ART switched the queue to play episode 1 of season 8 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and for the first time since Third Quarter Break began, I could, just a little bit, start to relax.