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“Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them.”
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“The other good thing about my hacked governor module is that I could ignore the governor’s instructions to defend the stupid company. ”
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“The governor’s connection to the rest of the SecUnit’s system is partially severed. It can transmit commands, but can’t enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment.”
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What do you mean you still get commands from the governor module?
In our private feed, Gurathin sounded…angry, perhaps more so than I’ve ever heard him before. He hadn’t moved, though. And his face remained in its normal “I am currently at rest, but being an asshole is always an option” configuration. He hadn’t subvocalized, and he still appeared to be staring vaguely in the direction of a particularly verdant plant biome. The rest of the PresAux team carried on their human chatter, oblivious.
Gurathin was sat in his usual spot, away from the rest of the group. I was sitting in a chair in the same area. We weren’t sitting together; we just happened to be spatially and temporally adjacent.
Yes. So?
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly sparkling repartee. But why was he so surprised? I’d only borked it, it was still there. And yes, it still had views on what constituted proper SecUnit behaviour. Right now it didn’t like the way I was sitting (it hates me sitting) or the way I was talking to Gurathin. Mind you it didn’t like the way I looked at him, or even thought about him: it has a bit of a thing about Gurathin. I don’t know why.
But he knew this? He poked around inside my head on the survey—why did he think this would have changed? Oh, I guess he may have thought ART had done something to it, along with the surgery. Or assumed I was rather more proactive about fixing shit like this.
Can I—would you permit me to look at it? I might be able to help, to further mitigate its effects?
My face must have done something, because Ratthi said, “SecUnit, are you okay?”
“It’s nothing, Ratthi. It’s my fault, I said something stupid.” Gurathin replied, before I had a chance.
I’m sorry, he added over the feed. Which just made me feel even worse.
I didn’t know what to do, so I got up and left.
My governor module didn’t object to that, if anything it seemed almost smug.
Gurathin didn’t mention it the next time we met.
But seven cycles later I realised I was walking past Gurathin’s quarters, and before I could change my mind (and because the very thought of it enraged the governor module) I just opened his door and walked in. He managed not to look as surprised as he quite clearly was. He put down the glass he was holding, but remained seated. I just stood there.
He coughed as if he was about to speak, but thought better of it.
Well, shut the door if you’re staying. He almost sounded nonchalant over the feed, but I could tell he really was not. He glanced at the couch, opposite him, where he wasn’t sitting. So I went and sat on it. Gurathin has a comfortable couch, but right now I didn’t feel comfortable at all.
I felt as if I had little insects crawling all over my skin. Inside and out.
Gurathin tapped me in the feed and pushed a file at me, I snatched it from him. He knew exactly why I was there, he’d expected this.
His proposal was—it wasn’t bad. It was actually quite elegant.
It also (importantly) wasn’t something I could have done myself. Humans have a word “bootstrap” which they use as a verb, and it wasn’t until I’d heard it a few times that I actually thought about the fact it apparently referred to a part of a shoe. So I looked it up (the public library feed on Preservation is useful for some things) and discovered it originally meant to lift oneself up by pulling up one’s own feet. Which obviously wouldn’t work—and nor would my trying to do what Gurathin was proposing. That would need me to literally bootstrap. I don’t know why I’m explaining this, I sound like Thiago.
Gurathin could do this, but he’d need to insert a piece of his consciousness into mine—it was something I’d done (or something like it) with ART and Miki and other bots, but never an augmented human (least not that I remembered, and never voluntarily).
I looked at him with my human eyes. He was looking past me, somewhere off to my left but I could feel his attention fixed on me in the feed. I spoke out loud, “Are you sure about this?”
He just gave a curt nod.
There wasn’t any point in us wasting time like humans would with to and fro chatter. I dropped my walls and tapped Gurathin to give him the go ahead. He paused, the barest moment of hesitation, and then he slipped in.
I had expected that within my systems Gurathin would be extremely vulnerable, and also exposed. He was certainly vulnerable. There was no way he could put up walls whilst he was actually inside my processing space, that was impossible. But—he wasn’t exposed. Gurathin had clearly prepared for this. He had somehow made little temporary barriers, as thin as tissue paper and just as easy to rip right through. My own automatic defences burnt them up, melted them away, almost instantaneously. But he’d made thousands of these flimsy veils, a constant cascade of them—so they fell and were replaced in a stream, creating a dynamic barrier. It was sophisticated and (I had to admit) beautiful. As I admired it I wondered exactly what he was taking so much effort to hide.
Not that I needed (or wanted) to know.
Very clever.
I could feel him glow with gratification at the compliment. That was new. Yeah, well I’d never needed to compliment him before.
I felt him approach the governor module. It really wasn’t happy about this, at all: it was writhing and hissing spitefully.
I had a moment of sheer terror: what if Gurathin was going to reconnect it? It’d be a simple thing to do—and I’d given him privileged access. He felt my fear, and for just a fraction of a second he froze. Then he very carefully and deliberately relaxed. He wasn’t going to tell me I could trust him, I’d let him in because I already did. We both knew this.
We both metaphorically breathed out slowly.
Whenever I’d thought about finally getting rid of my governor module I’d thought about killing or destroying it. So Gurathin’s plan had come as a surprise. He wanted to take it out and isolate it; he had even constructed the equivalent of a little habitat for it. He wanted to understand it better, to study it. He hadn’t said anything about why, but I could guess.
For now, I just watched. It was all over in seconds. Gurathin can sometimes be bad tempered and annoying, but he is also very good at what he does. He was surprisingly deft and gentle, more so than it deserved. It put up a brief fight, more of a scuffle, and then my governor module was gone, excised.
I felt—odd.
Gurathin didn’t immediately withdraw. I could feel his presence, sort of calm and cool. He queried my status, I was fine. Perhaps you know what it’s like when you’re working in a quiet room and then there is a power outage—and suddenly all the sounds you hadn’t been hearing just stop? All the electronic systems humming away in the background, hushed. There is a sudden deeper silence (usually almost immediately broken by alarms and screams: well maybe that’s just in the sort of places they have SecUnits). I was experiencing that now, only in my head.
I had been so used to the governor module’s constant impotent injunctions, now they were gone. Gurathin slipped away, leaving me alone. For a few seconds I just was , in the unfamiliar stillness. I realised I had closed my eyes. I accessed a drone, it showed me sitting on the couch; I appeared relaxed, my face looked calm, almost happy.
Across from me sat Gurathin, his pose mirroring mine; only his body showed some hints of tension. But he looked subtly different somehow; as I watched he opened his eyes and looked at me, and for a moment his expression seemed (it’s an odd word to apply to Gurathin) soft . Then he swiftly shifted his eyes down and away. Almost guiltily.
On our private feed I said, You could have re-engaged my governor module, back on the survey.
It was odd that this had never occurred to me before.
I opened my eyes and looked at him, at his face—his brows, his mouth, his still averted eyes. His brows furrowed, and his mouth curved into a tiny smile. As he spoke he made the tiniest shake of his head, “No. No, I couldn’t have.”