Chapter Text
Humans and augmented humans were always going on and on about how much they loved planets. The flora. The fauna. The large pools of liquids. Oh SecUnit, have you ever been in an ocean? Yes. The first time I went in an ocean, someone shot me in the head.
My humans would say that this was not the usual experience, but even if it was they would probably not hold it against the ocean. I was currently lying restrained on a table with a hole in my head, and I absolutely did.
I was lying on this table because PresAux had not learned from their previous experiences at all and had submitted the paperwork for another planetary survey. I had many, many better things to do (Strife in the Galaxy had recently spun up a spin-off and it was reportedly even messier than the original) but the thought of my humans going down to another shoddily mapped planet without me made my performance reliability drop ten percentage points. I could just picture them walking right into a creature’s open mouth without noticing, or trying to befriend a company SecUnit. So there I was, someone who had also not learned from previous experiences, standing on a planet and enduring conversations like “Oh SecUnit, have you ever been in an ocean before.”
The only good thing about the survey situation was that it was just me. During the initial planning there had been a heated debate about contract SecUnits amongst my humans, a rotation of Pin-Lee’s colleagues, and a gaggle of academics whose job titles in the feed were all a variation on ethicist. They gamed out scenarios. They were way too casual about hacking governor modules. I left the room a lot.
In the end, though, the bond company for this survey - not the company - had not even offered PresAux a SecUnit.
“I guess our reputation precedes us,” Pin-Lee had said.
So there I was, on a beach, attempting to watch Strife in the Galaxy: Rebirth.
Ratthi said, “SecUnit, have you ever been in an ocean before?” He was carefully digging samples out of the pink sand of the beach. In theory these were for Bharadwaj to analyze; in practice Ratthi was mostly experimenting with sand as an artistic medium. It was easy to tell where he had been because he’d left tiny sand structures behind at each sample location. They dotted a path back along the beach towards the hopper.
I did not pause the episode. “No,” I said.
“I think we should have a beach day,” he said. “I’m going to pitch it to the team. Sun, sand, and swimming!”
Humans drowned in water all the time. That was a frequent plotline in MedCenter Argala. “No.”
“Seccy,” he said. “Seccyyyyyy. There's nothing like an ocean on a beautiful day. You tip back and the water holds you like a warm cradle. Depending on the salt content you might be buoyant enough to float without effort.”
I didn't say anything, but I paused my episode.
“At night it's even more beautiful,” he said. He was staring out into the water. “The stars, wheeling overhead. Sometimes there's a glimpse of the nearest wormhole, if you're lucky. You know, that's how I - hang on, do you see that?”
I saw it. “Go back to the hopper,” I said.
“SecUnit -”
“I need another gun, Ratthi,” I told him, and he scrambled up immediately and sprinted away.
Something had bobbed briefly into sight out there in the waves. It had gleamed in the sun, a sharp metallic flash, and then moved back, against the forward motion of the waves, and sunk out of view. I only had three drones with me for this outing, and I sent two out over the water to take a closer look. I sent the third with Ratthi; he had almost reached the hopper.
Another flash, further out. I took ten steps forward and waded knee-deep in the water for a better look. There, Ratthi. I was in the ocean.
Ratthi panted up the ramp into the hopper and fumbled to open the weapons locker. “Come on, come on, Ratthi,” he muttered. He knelt down on the bench and started pulling guns out. I had my drone follow him in, and then told the hopper to pull up the ramp and lock it. “No!” he cried.
I continued the hunt, using the drones to fly a standard grid search. In the hopper, Ratthi threw himself at the closing ramp but was unable to get out without risking serious injury. He pounded at the door release with his fists.
There. That bright, metallic flash again. I turned toward it, lifted my arms and fired. At the same moment, one of the drones caught something else rising up out of the water. Was that a - SecUnit? I turned my head and my helmet shattered. A bright, sudden bolt of pain seared through my head. Threat assessment blared an alarm at me.
I tipped back into the warm water. The sky was getting dark overhead, and then it was night. There were no stars. I was not buoyant enough to float. The last thing I felt was a wave cresting over my head. I was gone.
*
Coming back online was a surprise.
“Ow,” I said. I had the strange sensation that I was floating, and then it vanished.
My console was full of errors and warnings. I cleared them out and tried to find out what had happened to Ratthi. There was nothing. I had lost connection to my drones just before the timestamp for that catastrophic ocean shutdown.
I reopened the error messages. No network connectivity. No vision. My helmet was gone. Diagnostics indicated that bolt of pain had been a projectile to the head but apart from some minor seeping most of the rest of the damage had been mitigated by automatic processes. I had no idea if Ratthi was alive or dead. Had he been taken with me? I couldn’t hear anyone else in the room.
“Hello?” I said. There was no answer. I was alone.
I was on a flat surface - a table? - and was secured to it by wrists and ankles. I made multiple, furious attempts to escape the restraints over the next three hours, with no success. I kept trying. There wasn’t much else to do, aside from speculate. I was sure I had seen a SecUnit in the water. I had no record of what or who had shot me. I had been abducted for unknown purposes. Why not just kill me? If Ratthi had escaped, had the hostiles tracked him back to the rest of the PresAux team?
Useless, Murderbot, I thought to myself. Useless, useless, useless.
There was a scraping noise outside. I froze. It sounded like someone was trying to open the door to this room - first tentatively, then with more confidence. It took a minute, but whoever it was managed to get through the lock.
The door opened. The door shut. There was a long pause. Footsteps stumbled toward me, then stopped, then started up again, getting near enough that I could feel the incremental increase in air temperature from a warm human standing uncomfortably close.
A familiar voice said: “SecUnit?”
I sat bolt upright - or tried, anyway. Again. Fucking restraints. Fucking annoying warm augmented humans who should absolutely not be here. “Get out.”
“Can’t,” said Gurathin. Asshole. He moved even closer. “Can I -”
“Yes, fine,” I said. I kept very still and non-threatening while he stepped up to poke at the restraints. I didn’t want to know, but I had to know. “Is Ratthi okay?”
“Ratthi’s okay,” Gurathin said, still busy investigating. “They didn’t try to hurt him. He made it back to the habitat and let us know what was going on.”
That was weird. My organics twisted and my performance reliability jumped up eight points, but it made no sense. “Why didn’t they kill him?”
Gurathin made a satisfied little aha noise, and cracked open the first ankle restraint. “That is a good question,” he said. “We don’t know.” He moved on to the second ankle.
“How did you find me?”
“You dropped off the feed, so we pulled up the satellite data and paid through the nose for an ultra high def image set from the abduction window,” said Gurathin. “They loaded you into a hopper and we tracked it to your location.”
Who were these people? Good enough to surprise me, sloppy enough to leave a witness. Extra sloppy to bring me to a location so insecure that Gurathin could get inside. Unless it was a trap.
“Do you know who these people are?” Gurathin said. “Pin-Lee got as far as a second shell company and neither of them match the logo I saw on my way in.”
“No,” I said, shortly.
“You’re still not on the feed,” Gurathin added. “I thought maybe it was something in the room blocking you, but I can’t find anything.”
“Maybe I am on the feed and I just don’t want to talk to you,” I told him. He cracked the second ankle restraint and moved up to my left wrist without saying anything. I wished very hard for visual inputs so I could gauge his expression. “I sustained some damage.”
“Status report?” said Gurathin. He got the left wrist restraint open but then seemed to struggle with the right. I heard the sound of a zipper and then the tell-tale clink of the tool set he liked to carry everywhere.
“I lost feed connectivity,” I said. “And.”
Gurathin swore at the last restraint and braced himself against the table. “And?”
“And my visual input is out. I can’t see.”
Gurathin yelped in surprise as the last restraint gave way; the tool he’d been using hit the floor and bounced as he staggered heavily into the table. I swung sideways (finally!!) and stood up.
“You can’t see?” said Gurathin. I listened to him grope on the floor for his escaped tool, then rummage around in the toolkit. “I didn’t notice any external damage to the ocular implant.”
“It’s probably internal,” I said. “Someone shot me in the head.” The rummaging noises stopped.
“Ah,” said Gurathin.
“It's not a big deal,” I said.
I could feel him staring at me. Now that I was standing he would be able to spot the exit wound, and those always looked worse.
“Can I -”
“Yes,” I said. “Fine.”
He prodded very carefully at the edges of the damage. I nudged my pain dials up a notch to better track his progress. I could hear his vision augments clicking faintly, presumably finding the right setting to get a good look at the mess the projectile had made inside my skull.
“You'll be okay,” said Gurathin, stepping back at last. His voice was tight.
“I know,” I said.
“It looks like the projectile took out the physical connections, not the processing centers. It's fixable, but not by me. Definitely not in this room with just my toolset.”
“I know,” I said. “I'm a highly advanced unit. I don't need a feed connection or working visual inputs to escape this room.”
“I know,” said Gurathin. He was amused now, instead of frightened or upset or whatever negative emotions humans got when they were looking at brains. “But would you like them?”
I had exaggerated. I was a highly advanced unit compared to, say, Gurathin, but risk assessment had a lot of negative things to say about my odds without visual input or access to the feed. Sanctuary Moon was a lot more positive about it. In episode 599, the ship loses internal and external sensors and NavBot 337’s visual inputs go down simultaneously - an act of sabotage by pirates. I pulled up the opening scene. One of the all-time great cold opens.
“Yes, I would like them,” I said.
Gurathin usually kept a hardline in the same pocket as his tools; I listened for the zipper sound and hit play. NavBot spends most of the episode saving the crew in increasingly unlikely scenarios, then stumbles at the last challenge and has to be saved by that episode’s guest star. A letdown. On rewatches, I usually skipped the last ten minutes.
“Ready?” said Gurathin.
“Yes,” I said, and felt him fumble at the dataport. The moment of connection was a relief. I swarmed down the line and used his intact network connectivity to start hunting for security cameras and other data. I peered through Gurathin’s eyes and prompted him to turn slowly around the room.
“Of course you’re watching Sanctuary Moon in here,” Gurathin said. His own relief came through a lot clearer in the feed than in his voice. I restarted the episode from the beginning. He did not appreciate it.
The hardline was only three feet, but neither of us needed to move: the room we were in was small and dim. It looked like I was the first occupant in a long time; the table and its restraints were the only things that seemed recent. The entrance wound in my forehead was small and half-hidden by my hairline; no wonder he’d missed it. I’d left a lot of fluid on the metal table, and looking at it made Gurathin’s heart jump. There was mold crawling up the walls. A stray thought flew by about disgusting human respiratory illnesses and standard pre-survey inocculations. Not my thought - Gurathin’s. Connecting via hardline with an augmented human like this was always messier than the shows made it look.
My search turned up a food printer, two powered doors, and a water reclamation system. No cameras, no HubSystem or SecSystem. There was at least one other augmented human nearby, two SecUnits, and nine guns with the type of low-energy active feed connection that indicated a proprietary subscription targeting software. Good: that made them very hackable. Bad: that many subscriptions implied a level of funding that did not match the rest of my findings.
I took a moment to try to minimize Gurathin’s visibility via the feed and discovered that he’d already done it. That was unusually competent of him but if he’d been doing so since he broke in here that greatly improved our odds of escape.
I pinged Gurathin with an information request. He sent a package after only a small delay. I tried to strip out the emotional data that came with it, but hardwired like this, it was an effort that would take more processing cycles than I wanted to give. I did my best to ignore the background churn of anxiety as I tracked his incursion into the building.
Gurathin had crept down to a hatch half-buried in the sand and made a note of the logo etched into it. He quietly wrenched it open, and then - was standing in a corridor just as dimly lit and abandoned as the room. I flagged 167 seconds missing from the files. I paused Sanctuary Moon and shoved the gap at him.
He sent back a transcript of our conversation and highlighted the section where I told him to get out and he told me he couldn’t.
I pulled up the contract Pin-Lee wrote for me and highlighted section 11.3, which guaranteed my access to survey resources and information as required to perform my duties.
Gurathin heaved a huge sigh and glanced at his hands. The nails were chipped and his fingertips and palms were abraded, as though he’d tried to hold on to something that had been torn out of his grasp. I leaned heavily on his feed until he rolled his eyes and gave up.
The hatch had a ladder, but it had been in poor structural shape. The access was narrow; a vertical tunnel just wide enough for an average-sized human or augmented human. On the fifth rung the entire ladder had jolted with Gurathin’s weight. Metal screeched as bolts sheared and the ladder began to drop. Gurathin had scrambled to brace himself against the rough walls but ultimately lost his battle with gravity and alternated between painful sliding and alarming free-fall the rest of the way down. His emotional data from the moment said: terror. The emotional data from right now said: embarrasment.
“Status report,” I said. I fought the urge to use my hands to turn his head and scan over his body for injuries and prodded for his physical feedback instead.
“It’s not a big deal,” said Gurathin. Asshole, asshole. He opened a path and let me feel the throbbing in his hands, the soreness in his arms and shoulders and back. He’d landed on his ankle and then his hip. Nothing seemed broken, but the pain when he walked explained the way he’d stumbled into the room. The moment he’d opened the door and seen me on the table flashed through the connection. I hit play on Sanctuary Moon.
“We’ll have to find another way out,” Gurathin said. He sent a request for the data I’d gathered so far and I granted it.
“The ladder was mostly intact,” I said. “I can lift it high enough to brace against the access tunnel while you climb out.”
“That doesn’t get you out, though,” Gurathin objected.
“What about the others?” I asked. “Can they pull us up?” SecUnits are heavy, but this group was resourceful.
More emotional data from Gurathin. I didn’t bother to try to parse it. “It might ... take them a while to get here,” he said. “I didn’t tell them I was leaving and I set a timelock on the satellite images. I didn’t want them to get hurt.”
That was unbelievably stupid. It was also exactly what I would have done. He sent me a countdown with 89 minutes left, and a second one for 37 minutes that hadn't started yet - travel time. “I sent the hopper back to them on autopilot,” he said.
126 minutes was longer than I was comfortable risking a stay in this room, especially with Gurathin there. To get out together, we would likely need to maintain the hardline connection. Three feet of wire was not long enough to use Gurathin's eyes and feed and keep him out of any combat. What would Mensah say if I got Gurathin killed? Conclusion: I would have to find my own way out.
A memory surfaced in the feed. No, not a memory. A preconstruction. I felt Gurathin try to claw it back, but it was too late. Gurathin, leaving without me. Gurathin, breaking the news to Mensah. The emotional data attached to the preconstruction rushed in like the wave that had broken over my head as I fell, as insistent as the terror he’d felt when the ladder gave way. I shoved at it and felt Gurathin struggling to do the same. It receded under our combined efforts.
“Sorry,” Gurathin said, awkwardly. “But I am not leaving without you.”
I turned to face the wall, but my only visual input was staring at my back and it did not have the usual effect. After a moment Gurathin turned to face the wall, too. That was better.
“You have to do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you,” I said. It wasn't a yes, exactly, but his heart jumped a couple of beats and then settled back down, so it was clear he'd taken it as one. “No arguing and no -” I had been about to say heroics, which he would have been insufferable about, so I finished with, “impulsive decisions without my input.” The original word echoed between us in the hardline anyway. Another flash of amusement. Ugh.
“I won't if you won't,” he said.
“That's different,” I said. “It's my job to keep my humans and augmented humans safe.” Instead of responding with any kind of counterargument, he accidentally took us on a brief and disorienting spin through his impressions of the immediate aftermath of my cliff dive with Mensah.
It was my job, though. It was in fact almost the first decision I had ever made for myself, and one I kept making, over and over and over.
“It’s not different,” Gurathin said.
Emotional data swamped us again. It was his job, and it was almost the first decision he had made for himself after too long removed from his own life, and it was one he kept making, over and over and over, and by the time we managed to surface from that, coming to a verbal agreement felt redundant.
We turned to face the door. Risk assessment said that our best chance of survival was in maintaining a hardline connection. Conclusion: this needed to be a stealth escape. Risk assessment also said our odds of success remained low, but I'd gotten clients out of worse situations.
“Well, we die, we die,” Gurathin said.
Ugh.