Work Text:
Three pinged me with the prearranged code phrase as soon as Holism was within range of Preservation Station. I exercised my right to walk away like an asshole anytime I want, and left the poetry reading Ratthi had dragged me to. Unobtrusively. (Mostly.) Time to initiate my portion of the plan.
(This was not as dramatic as I made it sound. I just marked myself unavailable on my social feed (yes, my humans had collectively bullied me into having a social feed) and walked to the meeting place.)
I am an anxious and paranoid asshole. I know this about myself. (How could I not? I’m the one that has to live inside this head.) But even I had begun to admit, if only to myself, that paranoia isn’t always needed in Preservation. I might have relaxed a smidge. Then my inbuilt weapons began to fail, and the paranoia came raging back. (Fuck the company and their shitty planned-obsolescence parts.) Disaster after assassination after catastrophe played out in my imagination, with me unarmed and unable to save my humans. As best I could tell from my diagnostics, the next time I fired either of my inbuilt energy weapons there was a 68% chance of failure, up to and including explosion. I had not test fired them, obviously. I was trying to be subtle about this, not dramatically end up in Station Medical.
My options for replacement or repair were limited, because weapons like me aren’t legal in the Preservation Alliance. (Pin-Lee was still angrily working on that.) And because the company uses proprietary parts that I had no way to obtain,with ART stuck in dock at the University for maintenance and some major upgrades it was very excited for. (It was going to be even more insufferable once it got them, I just knew it.)
If I told Mensah, I knew she would find a way to fix this. She had gotten me the drones, after all. But the state of the legal case was delicate, and Pin-Lee had strongly advised (read: threatened) me to be as invisible as possible for the short term while she worked on some stuff. Asking Mensah to bend Preservation’s weapons laws to their breaking point would be the opposite of helping my own case.
Inoperable weapons would make a lot of people a lot happier about my presence here.
I didn’t want to be considered a person only if I was disarmed.
So I was busy quietly panicking to myself when Holism docked six weeks ago and Three almost broke down my door trying to figure out what was wrong. It convinced Holism to help, and now they were back, finally. I made it to the rendezvous location and watched two and a half episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon while I waited for Holism to dock and Three to disembark and get here.
On reflection, I probably didn’t have to leave the poetry thing so abruptly. I hoped I hadn’t upset Ratthi too much.
I had chosen an empty workroom deep in the Pressy, the well-preserved old ship at the heart of Preservation Station. We wouldn’t be disturbed down here, and if anything went wrong there wouldn’t be collateral damage to any humans. The historical tour areas of the Pressy had workrooms stocked with tools and old supplies, made to look as if the refugees had only just arrived in the system and stepped away from their tasks momentarily. (Most of the old ship wasn’t creepy, but scenes like that definitely were.) Obviously I wasn’t going to use the display rooms for this, so I had been secretly borrowing tools from station maintenance for the last few weeks. (It wasn’t stealing if I put them back when I was done.)
Holism had offered to do the repairs itself, but it was too proud of its statistics to delete the records of resource usage. And it’s way too honest with its crew to keep quiet. And I didn’t trust it. (Three trusted it. But Three is insufficiently paranoid sometimes.) And just asking for its help securing the necessary components had already given Holism enough ammunition in its ongoing sibling rivalry with ART. (I fully expected a temper tantrum from ART, and was already collecting rare non-corporate media from the Preservation Archive with which to appease it.)
Three waved at my sentry drones when it entered the Pressy, walking casually with its travel bag over its shoulder, clearly running its walk-like-a-human code. When it stepped through the workroom door and into my palpable aura of anxiety, it said, “It’s ok, I wasn’t followed.” My performance reliability ticked up by a couple percentage points. “I think I’ve got everything we need. If not, Holism says it can hack a station recycler.”
I felt weird about that. “No.”
I am more than capable of erasing evidence of my interference from such simple systems, Holism butted in to say.
“It’s not that. Just, no.” Despite all my complaining about Preservation’s naive idealism, it felt wrong to use their resources to build weapons without permission. (Look, I’m not saying it makes sense. I’m also a contradictory asshole. Deal with it.)
This was really a job for a weapons bot, with its dozen specialized appendages. We only had three hands at a time and some basic tools, but we made it work. Nothing exploded when I test fired at the pile of trash and scrap I had politely asked a maintenance bot to stash nearby. The fine-tuning for lower power output was gone, but we made sure I had a reliably non-lethal setting. The first thing I’d do when ART got here is demand some upgrades of my own and replace these shitty things, but for now my weapons were at least operable.
“Thank you for letting me help you with this,” Three said. “I like Holism, but I miss having a friend like me around.”
It was talking about SecUnits 01 and 02 of course, but all I heard was an echo of poor, dead Miki. I’ve never had a friend like me before! I had a bunch of weird squishy feelings all at once. I didn’t say anything. But my stupid face probably did something particularly stupid. Three set down the tools it was cleaning and studied me with its peripheral vision.
It said, “Uh, you can hug me, if you need to,” in a bad imitation of my voice. I was certain it was smiling on the side of its face I couldn’t see. (I thought about calling in one of my drones to check, but it would notice.)
(Sometimes I wish I could resurrect 2.0 so I could kill it again for giving away my personal files like that. And then I remember: if not for that, I would have been the new TargetControlSystem, forever imprisoned in crystal-fungus armor. And then I get sad about AdaCol-1, and feel even worse for getting angry at 2.0.) (This right here? Is one of those times.)
I stood up from the chair and dropped my walk-like-a-human code. I relaxed upright, releasing the slight hunch to my shoulders and upper spine that de-emphasized my height and threat level. I didn’t have to soften the edges of what I was, here with Three. We knew what we were; equals (+/- 2 cm).
Then I did something none of us expected, not the two rogue SecUnits nor their host of onlooking ghosts: I lunged forward and hugged it.
It wasn’t like touching a human. Three was as solid as me, I wasn’t afraid of accidentally hurting it. It wasn’t going to leak fluids on me. It wasn’t terrible, actually.
It wasn’t terrible in a kind of nice way.
“You are never to mention this to the humans,” I said. Three nodded and carefully wrapped its arms around me in turn. I softened against it, head turned to the side to avoid any weird face-touching.
Had Three and I met under any other (much more likely) circumstances, we would have killed each other.
Instead, we held each other, because we could. We could choose to, now.
It wasn’t terrible at all.