Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It seems like there should be a very neat line, at least for humans, between dead and not dead, but I’ve seen enough messy half-alive humans to know that there is no such clear distinction. I’ve seen bodies that were still breathing despite missing part of their heads, bodies that weren’t breathing despite their owners being fully conscious. I wouldn’t call either option alive. I wouldn’t call either option dead, either.

For a machine intelligence, the border is even blurrier. Did ART really die when TargetSystem deleted it, overwriting its entire being with zero after zero after zero? If so, was it resurrected when I unlocked its backup? Or was there no such thing as resurrection, a consciousness interrupted dead and fated to stay that way forever? That would mean the being I called ART was actually ART 2.0, a new person inheriting an old body along with the memories of the previous owner. That was a morbid thought.

You could fall a billion light-years down this rabbit hole. Was a machine that was powered off but ready to restart dead? Or was it merely… not sleeping, that was a human thing, but some equivalent? What about a bot that had been disassembled? All the bits and pieces there, good as new, ready to be pieced back together… is that bot dead? It’s certainly not whatever the bot equivalent of sleeping is, it’s hard to argue that it’s alive… but is it dead?

I don’t know. These questions are probably above my pay grade, even now that I actually get paid (quite well, I might add (or I used to--I doubt I'll be picking up my next paycheck)).

Certain kinds of media just love to discuss these philosophical headaches, not in the context of bots, not that I’ve seen anyway, but in fantasy settings. Dead ‘Till Dawn had zombies, vampires and demons around every corner and a revolving door between whatever plane the living heroes were currently inhabiting and the realm of the dead. One character became a zombie during a mid-season finale and then he—and his companions—had to decide whether he was really still himself, whether he was alive or dead. A huge amount of runtime revolved around exploring what “undead” really meant. There was another character whose soul was obliterated through some horrific act of ancient and forbidden magic carried out by a recurring villain, but her body lived on and her personality seemed unchanged. This was (understandably in a world where the afterlife was very real and frequently visited) a constant source of anxiety for her and she faced vicious discrimination at times as a result of being a “soulless husk.” She came to terms with it, decided that she was still alive and still a person, that she was not a dead thing. The zombie decided the same about himself and the two of them ended up riding off into the sunset together at the end of the series.

Dead ‘Till Dawn intentionally left the viewer with a lot of unanswered, vaguely unsettling philosophical garbage to chew on. It was a great series—everyone agreed there—and I’d been unable to put it down (metaphorically—it’s not like I have to hold anything to watch shows in the feed) when I saw it. I’d never rewatched it, though. It made me feel… things I didn’t want to think about. I knew why that was, even though I’d rather not admit it.

It wasn’t as if any situation I’d lived through was comparable to the things that happened in Dead ‘Till Dawn ’s particular crapsack world… but there were plenty of things that weren’t not comparable, either, like season 2 episode 12, Professionals.

Professionals focused in on two contract killers sent to assassinate the heroes. The entire episode was a very skilled writer musing, in serial form, about the different meanings of cruelty. One of the killers was a sadist who played with their captive, torturing them not for information but for pleasure. The other caught one of the protagonists in a booby trap, a magical snare that slowly choked him nearly to death over the course of hours, inflicting every bit as much suffering as the sadist but with none of the emotion. Using the snare, allowing the snare to do its job without interference, was purely a matter of practicality, of convenience. This killer didn’t care enough about their captive to have any feelings about their suffering. The screams of agony elicited no pleasure, no discomfort, no reaction at all, because the captive hero was just that unimportant in the killer’s twisted worldview.

The latter killer’s indifference was cruelty, that much was obvious. He was every bit as cruel as his sadist counterpart. The only difference was in the aesthetics.

I was familiar enough with such things. The Corporation Rim had plenty of sadistic cruelty and plenty of indifferent cruelty, too.

This was the latter sort, indifferent cruelty. None of the people involved cared about me enough to enjoy hurting me. They didn’t even believe I could be hurt. None of this meant anything more to them than skipping a stone across a pond, watching it sink into oblivion at the end of its brief flight.

Fixing my data port was too much work when they were just going to take it apart that same day. That was person hours. That was resources. Physical restrains and paralytic drugs were dirt cheap and quick in comparison.

I’d never been dosed with something like this before; governed SecUnits are just put into repair lockdown mode while the techs work on them. My eyes were open a slit. I couldn’t close them, couldn’t even move them or change the focus. That was probably normal, not that it mattered if it wasn’t (and it wasn’t as if I could ask anybody about it).

“I don’t get why we’re being so damn careful with the thing. It took down how many other units before they brought it in?” I’d decided to call this one Squeaky Voice. They were smart, the voice of reason. Out of the four construct techs in the lab, they were the sole sensible one. “Explain to me why we didn’t toss it wholesale in the recycler?”

“It took down four units,” Gruff Voice replied, “injured two others. Quite impressive, don’t you think? We’re supposed to find out how.”

“It’s plenty obvious how,” Squeaky Voice complained, “it’s mean. Someone taught this thing how to fight dirty and it puts the training to good use. Management ought--”

“Management will tell us what to do,” Smooth Voice interrupted, “and we will do as we are told. They know best. We are just the technicians here. We can’t see the big picture. They can.”

“I agree with Kalik. It does make me nervous that we brought this thing in still functional,” the last one was Boring Voice. Nothing distinguished their tone from an average taken from several hundred humans speaking at the same time.

“It’s not going to be laying around,” Gruff Voice replied. “That’s the whole point of taking it apart.”

Squeaky Voice seemed to have realized how insubordinate their words might seem on the recordings that some other SecUnit was certainly making of this conversation. Still, they couldn’t resist the urge to be a reasonable, sensible person and point out how absurdly dangerous it was to bring a rogue murderbot into a lab alive and conscious rather than blasting the rogue to pieces on the docks and throwing the remains into the recycler. “I will always do what I’m instructed, of course, I respect management’s decision. I’m sure they understand how dangerous this thing is and how risky it is to have around better than me. It just makes me nervous to be here with it, knowing it can still hear us, that it could kill us in a second if it got loose.”

“Probably less than a second,” Boring Voice muttered.

“Well then, we’d best work quickly, hm? With four of us we can be done in an hour at most. I’m sure our subject will appreciate our undivided attention.” They all laughed, some more sincerely than others.

The little slit of white ceiling that I could see was replaced by the blue of a tech’s scrubs for a moment, then they slipped out of view again and everything was, once more, sickening off-white. There was no feed in this room at all. I would have killed for a single input, a view of anything but that slice of ceiling.

I knew what they were going to do to me, both in the precise, clinical terms of my own maintenance manual (which I had stolen tens of thousands of hours ago) and from my own experience (well, I knew about the first parts, anyway).

I’d joked about it plenty of times before, about being partially dismantled because of a clerical error. As long as I treated it like a joke it was a joke, right? That’s how it works, thoughts create reality or whatever they said in that children’s program with winged horses that I hadn’t cared for all that much.

“Get the plate layer access keys. Let’s get started.”

As long as I talked about it like it was fine it was fine. As long as I talked about myself like I was equipment I was equipment. It would be wrong to do something like this to a person but I wasn’t a person so it wasn’t wrong.

How many times would I have to repeat that to myself before it stopped sounding like a lie?

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think that treating humans like disposable slaves was wrong. If I didn’t think that murder was wrong, I would be only a murderbot not Murderbot. For a long time I’d left myself out of the category of people, so I couldn’t be murdered, so hurting me or killing me wasn’t wrong.

It was a mindset that I’d worn like a mask for more than 30,000 hours. It was a mindset that could protect me from anything… It was a mindset I could no longer wrestle myself into.

From Mensah to Arada to Iris, all of my humans treated me like a person. ART treated me like a person. Three treated me like a person and I treated it like a person because it was, it so obviously was, and if I said that I wasn’t a person because I was a SecUnit then that meant Three wasn’t a person, either. If I said killing me wasn’t murder because I was a SecUnit then killing Three wasn’t murder either and that was fucking unacceptable. If anyone did this, anything like this, anything a tenth this bad, to Three, I would tear that monster to pieces and shove the remains into ART’s recycler (someone had done something like this to ART and I had torn them to pieces… and I wasn’t actually sure whether their bodies had been shoved in ART’s recyclers, probably not, but maybe).

I’d never get the chance to tear anyone apart for this.

Would Three get the chance? Three or ART or maybe one of their humans… would they come here, waste their escape that I’d traded my life for, to take the terrible, righteous revenge that I would have taken if it had been Three in my place in this lab? Or would they do the smart thing and run, never look back, accept my sacrifice and get even in the long run, do it for everyone’s sake not just mine?

Maybe. I could hope.

It didn’t hurt. I’d turned my pain sensors down all the way. It was jarring, though, wrong, a raw, cold feeling on the internals and nerves in my ankles that they had just exposed to the air by removing my feet.

“Circulation locks here and here, then we can strip the organics. I’ve never worked on one where you had no system access at all before. It’s an interesting challenge, huh? Watch the capacitors, Reileiy. They’re still going to be charged.”

“I’m getting some thicker gloves for this.”

I hoped ART and Three would take our humans and do the smart thing, run like hell. Unfortunately, that would be very out of character for all of them (especially ART who had showed that it was willing to threaten the lives of hundreds of people if it could maybe save mine).

I didn’t let myself hope that they would somehow rescue me. Nothing would hurt more than hoping for a rescue. Well, a rescue attempt that ended with the company in possession of Three or any of my humans would hurt worse than hope, and that was the only way that a rescue attempt would possibly end in this scenario. Nobody got out of the heart of this station without the company’s permission.

Nobody got out alive, anyway… and that brought me back to the original questions. Would I be dead when they shipped me out of here in fifty different boxes?

“Damn. This is really—wait. This is a nonstandard modification. It’s welded here. Need a plasma cutter.”

“Gotcha. Careful with that.”

The shock of heat against my knee sent adrenaline surging through me because I knew that I was being burned, even if I couldn’t feel it.

There was no reason to be afraid. Fear was for the unknown. I knew exactly what they were going to do (minus these nonstandard approaches for nonstandard modifications) so what was there to be afraid of? It would just be more of this, heat and discomfort and missing sensations like black holes (processes searching, searching constantly to connect with parts that weren’t there anymore, returning Error Retry after Error Retry like a mounting symphony of tone-deaf trumpets shouting in my brain) for another thirty minutes and then nothing.

It wasn’t going to hurt, not really, and then I wouldn’t feel anything ever again.

That was death, wasn’t it? By definition? And here we were back to that original question again.

“Careful. If you cut off its circulation too soon nerve tissue could be damaged and we want all of its relays intact. Scheffer wants them shipped to them for study.”

“Think they’ll be able to tell what makes this thing so special? If we could harness that kind of skill it’d be good for the new line of Combats.”

“Scheffer’s good at their job. They’ll probably learn a lot of things.”

So they were going to take me apart and ship the pieces off station to another construct technician. I’d figured as much already. In theory, if this Scheffer wanted they could put me back together good as new, as long as my neural relays were flash frozen and preserved, as long as the crash chips with core programming and memories weren’t damaged or intentionally wiped. Eventually they’d probably dissect the pieces of my brain and then reassembly would be off the table.

So would I die when they started cutting up my neural tissue hundreds or thousands of hours from now? Or would I die when they took my head apart and pulled out my neural relays in fifteen minutes?

I didn’t want to think about that anymore. I didn’t want to think about anything anymore (give it a quarter hour, Murderbot, and you'll get that wish granted). Cold, creeping tendrils of numbness and associated error codes crept further and further up what had been my chest but was mostly scrap now. I couldn’t ignore it, the foreign, empty cold, and what remained of my stupid organics insisted on panicking and dumping stress hormones into my remaining blood. It was a helpless, sick terror which I could hardly remember feeling before, a frantic desire to scream, to thrash, to beg for mercy, and my inability to do any of those things only compounded the terror making it steadily worse, uncontrollable.

It was irrational. Irrational. There was nothing to be afraid of. I knew how this would go. I knew the procedures. No unknowns. Nothing to fear.

“Alright. Disconnect cardiac and pulmonary pumps… now. I’m ready to get the supports wired in.”

A deluge of emergency warnings and errors hit my brain like a chainsaw as they unhooked my entire circulatory and respiratory system. They’d use an easily connected external heart-lung machine to keep the delicate pieces of me alive while they finished up.

I could shut myself down if I wanted, check out early. Who would want to claim their final minutes of consciousness if this was what was offered? But that would be trading one hell for another. The organic bits of me that remained would have some awareness, still, of what was happening with none of the context to understand it. It would be a literal and figurative nightmare. Maybe it would still be better than this. Maybe not.

“Help me with the service lock here. They’re not usually this hard to get open.”

“I doubt anybody’s been poking around in this thing’s head for a long time.”

“Alright. Auxiliary chips first then the crash chips.”

“Sure we don’t want to go for the relays first? I wouldn’t want to risk damaging them trying to get all the other chips out.”

“Always get the chips first. There’s a good reason why we take them apart in this order.”

The first time they took me apart, they hadn’t--

“Alright. Here’s the first crash chip. Get it sealed up.”

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_5’: No such file or directory

I couldn’t remember. There had been something like this before. Something back when I still worked for--

“That’s two.”

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_8’: No such file or directory

I worked for… for someone. Did I work for someone?

“Three.”

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_19’: No such file or directory

Something… where was I? What was happening? What were these errors? Why couldn’t I see anything but white?

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_11’: No such file or directory

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_13’: No such file or directory

I needed to know. It was cold. Was it cold? Was that the right word? I thought it might be. I’d used it for something like this before, to describe it to—to--

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_16’: No such file or directory

Why not? They should be there. Where were all my memory core blocks? Was there anything I could access at all?

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_1’: No such file or directory

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_2’: No such file or directory

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_3’: No such file or directory

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_4’: No such file or directory

Cannot access ‘/dev/block_5’: No such file or directory

“Last one.”

Bus Error 10

Bus Error 10

Bus Error 10

Shutdown

Restart

Failure: Boot Disk Not Found

Retry

Restart

Failure: Boot Disk Not Found

Shutdown

No Restart

Someone laughing at me, another voice speaking in incomprehensible words, but the tone so clear and clinical.

“Neural relay one. Freeze it.”

Endless winding corridors, all filled with hungry things. All closing in on me, twisting into monstrous patterns. Consumers of flesh. Consumers of metal.

“Relay two.”

Too narrow to fit. Walls squeezing down on me. Suffocating cold. Cutting sharp.

“There’s three.”

Cold. Dark. Laughing. Things in the dark. Gray skinned. Fingers in my head. Sharp teeth. Sharp teeth on their fingers—claws? Claws.

“Four. Half done.”

Teeth-claw-dark—cave—twisting—shape.

“Careful with this one. Something odd about it here.”

Shape? Maybe-shape.

“Six.”

Point. Sharp.

“Almost done. Careful! If you drop this we’re all in big trouble!”

Cold.

Chapter Text

The bond company backed up routine security recordings to central hubs, storing them for several corporation standard months before deleting them to clear space. Three and I had worked for days to trick the station’s SecSystem into giving us enough access to snatch these recordings. There was no guarantee that my SecUnit would appear in any of the recordings considered “routine” enough to back up here, but it was the only possible lead we had at this point. The company was keeping its fate quiet, with not a single message in any kind of official news.

It was like it had never existed.

I found the recording within five seconds of gaining system access.

I did not let the humans watch it. I especially didn’t let Three watch it.

I watched the construct technicians laugh about it, like it meant nothing to them as they stripped the flesh from my SecUnit’s bones and support plates and peeled away the layers of inorganics beneath. It was awake the whole time. It didn’t move a centimeter, completely paralyzed, but it was awake. “Management knows best, management knows best,” the technicians repeated like broken speakers.

I was raised with a family, a good family. They cared about me and I cared about them, as equals. There was no doubt that they loved me, that I loved them, though nobody expected all of our emotions to work in exactly the same way; I had no hormones floating around my brain to influence my feelings and thought processes.

For much of my life I thought my kin represented the default behavior for humans, even though I saw so many examples to the contrary in the corporation rim. Some sort of cognitive dissonance prevailed in which I assumed the greedy humans unconcerned with others’ suffering were just… confused. They were slightly broken humans in need of recalibration.

It was my SecUnit who showed me how wrong I was to think that way, my SecUnit who taught me the true depths of human cruelty. I thought I’d understood, after it shared with me its memories of vicious, casual torture by its slave masters, the depths of depravity that humans sank to, understood that cruelty, not kindness, was the default behavior of many humans in the corporation rim.

I had still not understood. I had not understood how cruel humans could be. I had not understood how cruel I could be. I had killed before, threatened to kill before, but always in order to save someone, always in an act of defense (and often desperation) to preserve something I loved. I was not indifferent to the suffering I caused and I would spare every life I could. That was how it had been, until now.

There was nobody to save here. My SecUnit was dead. I’d watched them kill it slowly, viciously, indifferently, over the course of an hour. There was no recourse. There was nothing to protect. There was only a void to fill, nothing to take but revenge.

The desire for revenge was not an entirely new emotion to me, but I’d never felt it like this. It leapt about through my processors like a virus, overclocking CPU’s until they ran hot, poisoning every thought, stripping away my capacity for logical thought. What was there to gain in spilling their blood? There was nothing to gain for me, nothing to gain for my poor SecUnit, and yet it was now listed as my number one priority, above even keeping the engines running.

I’m going to kill them. I said on the public feed. I’m going to track them down and I’m going to kill them, and then I’m going to kill their parents, too, for giving life to them, and their grandparents if they have any, and everyone who ever loved them.

“Peri!” Iris said, shocked because she could hear how much I meant it.

I’d been angry before, certainly. I’d been murderously angry before on occasion but this, this was an intensity I’d never felt before. I didn’t think I’d ever even seen any human this angry. The only good references I had were scenes from media, usually the scenes just before someone went on a rampage. A rampage sounded nice. I tentatively tagged the emotion as “apoplectic.”

“I want them to die! I want them to suffer!” and that I said aloud without really meaning to. “I want them to regret what they did!”

“Peri…” Seth and Matteo exchanged concerned glances, and they were right to be concerned.

They dismantled it, I assume? Three asked quietly over the feed. Having finished the part of the hacking that required it to be present on the station proper, it was making its way back to me as quickly as possible, Tarik accompanying it to watch its back while it was busy in the feed.

Yes.

Seth sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. He wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t surprised, either. This was what we had expected them to do. It was just… knowing what had probably happened to my dear friend and seeing it done were two very different things.

They did it while it was conscious, over the course of an hour. They laughed about it.

I was considering whether I could hijack the simple bot pilot next to me, remove it from its body (I could find it a new one later) and use its ship to ram the station as the first step in my rampage of revenge when Three asked, Could you killware clone me? Like you did with 1.0 to get 2.0? Its rage permeated the feed, the anger nearly as thick and hot as mine despite the other SecUnit not having seen first hand exactly what they had done to our friend. In that moment both of us would have gleefully died to cause serious harm to the company. This… this was a perfect way to get revenge. Let Three have the joy of a murder-suicide revenge spree.

The company and their ilk were the ones that insisted rogue constructs went on killing sprees, after all. Why not give them the reality they asked for?

Yes. I could.

“Peri, please, just…” Seth was angry, too, I could see that, but he wasn’t angry like I was. “I am furious, probably not as angry as you are--”

If you had seen it , you would be, I snarled in the feed.

“I know,” Seth said, “and you didn’t let me see it, I think because you understand that someone needs to be a voice of reason here. We all need to think before we act, or we’ll end up hurting our cause or walking into a trap.”

I didn’t let you see it because SecUnit would not have wanted anyone to see it that way. I know you’re right, but killware preparation takes concentration and many hours. Certainly we’ll all be calm and rational by the time the preparations are through.

Iris pinched her nose. “I think that’s probably as good as we’re going to get, dad.”

She sighed deeply and sank into a chair in the location my SecUnit had called the “argument lounge.” That was the room’s official name now. I updated it on the schematics. They could take my friend from me but they couldn’t erase it from my life.

Seth sat down beside Iris and she leaned heavily against him, sniffling quietly.

I wanted someone to lean on me like that. I used to lean on SecUnit all the time. It called me overbearing. That always amused me, encouraged me to tease it more. Teasing was good for bored SecUnits; it enriched their lives. They needed more excitement than just watching media all day.

I would never get the chance to tease it like that again, or lean on it in a non-teasing manner, either.

Three could lean on me but Three was not my mutual administrative assistant. It would be nice, but it wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would ever be the same.

Rage was generally followed by sorrow. I had no interest in feeling sorrow just yet, so I would see what I could do to remain viciously angry for as long as possible.

I prepared the sandboxes necessary for killware cloning. I discussed plans with Three. I wrote a two-million word manifesto explaining my undying vendetta against the company and, for reasons that I did not fully understand, encrypted it and transmitted it to Holism.

I split off an entirely separate copy of my mind (as I might for a drone instance) in order to answer my crew’s concerned queries because I was in no state to interact with them while ruminating on revenge murder.

This could have gone better.

“Peri?” Iris asked me quietly, having retreated to her own room after taking what comfort she could from human contact. “Do you… need anything? I mean, can I help you somehow?”

“No,” the other instance of me replied. It sounded completely despondent rather than angry. “Nobody can help me. I don’t want anybody to help me. I don’t want to do anything.”

“Aren’t you… working with Three?” she asked.

“The other instance of me is doing that,” it moped. “It’s still furious. I’m just sad.” It sounded far beyond sad. I was glad I didn’t have to experience that just yet, glad I could linger in this particular stage of grief.

“Oh, Peri,” Iris whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not fair,” the other instance of me complained. “It was one of the best people I’ve ever known or heard of. It was told that it was not a person and could not have morals, that it didn’t need to think about the consequences of its actions, and it decided that it would be a person and have morals and think about consequences anyway. Humans tortured it, mercilessly and without thought, for years, and it still decided that it liked most humans, that it would protect them, that it would have friends who it cared about.” The other instance of me paused. “Who does that? I would have gone looking for revenge. I am going looking for revenge.”

“It’s not fair,” Iris agreed quietly. She didn’t tell the other instance that the whole CR wasn’t fair. Everyone knew it wasn’t fair. Pointing it out wouldn’t be helpful.

“None of it means anything, does it?” other me asked, completely toneless. “All the existentialists and the nihilists are right. They can kill my SecUnit and it doesn’t matter. I can kill them and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything.”

It was strange, watching myself have an existential crisis from an outsider’s perspective.

“It did mean something,” Iris said quietly, “because it meant something to me and to you and to the rest of the crew and to the Preservation survey team. We have to create our own meaning.”

“That sounds much too difficult. I think I’d rather watch media alone and be bored and depressed.” Was I really this melodramatic? That was a stupid question. Of course I was.

“Peri…”

Three was not as good a hacker as my vicious little 1.0 had been. My SecUnit had faced trial by fire, and there was no real substitute for that kind of high-risk, on the job training. Three was plenty good enough, though. It had learned and been taught well. I armed it with my most vicious code bundles, many of which had been written within the last hour or two. I had never been quite so highly motivated to engineer havoc-wreaking malware before. It was amazing what one could accomplish during a revenge fueled rampage.

I had no doubt that Three.1 (we’d decided that would be its name) would do an unspeakable amount of damage in the brief life we had planned for it.

I existed. I was determined and I was angry, but it was a patient kind of anger. I could wait before I acted on it. I riffled through the files available to me… ah. Yes. That was the plan. I liked this plan, of course I did, because I’d helped make it, before I helped make myself to carry it out.

Do you know who you are? The Perihelion asked me, peeking into the little box where I was spinning up my core processes.

I would be Three.1 I replied.

Do you remember the plan?

Certainly. Hide until you are well clear of the system and then “tear the place to shreds.” I was going to make them afraid, make them suffer, make them regret what they’d done to our friend. I was to cost them as much money as possible: erase contracts, send wire transfers to random feed addresses, reroute transports, crash haulers, revoke credentials, make them think I was going to blow up the reactors, make them think that for as long as possible, tease them with that threat until they were bone-pale with terror. I was here to torture them all the way a few of them had tortured 1.0. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right, but nothing was fair and nothing was right and nobody cared.

I wasn’t supposed to actually destroy the reactors or blow up the station or otherwise cause massive human fatalities (although the Perihelion had pointed out that nobody could stop me if I decided I wanted to; I was in no way constrained in my actions). This wasn’t even the station where 1.0 had died; it was just the nearest target and we were too furious to wait. Perhaps there would be a Three.2 who would get to cause chaos in a more fitting place at a later time. The point was, these weren’t the humans we wanted to kill (with a few potential exceptions in a little list that I kept close in secure storage) and, more than that, they wouldn’t understand why they were being killed. What would be the point of that? I couldn’t send a message to their feeds saying SecUnit AS-A149BC4137D192FF8 sends its regards and then open the airlocks and expect the humans to understand who that SecUnit had been or why it was sending regards through me.

Send me out. I’m ready to get started.

I wish you the greatest of success , the Perihelion snarled, tone thick with what could only be called blood lust.

It opened a channel with the port authority and I slipped through, quietly hiding myself in an idle auxiliary system that handled emergency situations. I curled into a tiny, unobtrusive corner (metaphorically, of course, as there were no actual corners in a computer system) and settled in to wait. At a busy company station like this, hundreds of ships would come and go in the course of twenty hours. That would be more than enough delay to completely obscure any connection between a vicious killware attack and the Perihelion .

The station was like a rabbit warren. I was the ferret slinking through the tunnels (I had seen some excellent documentaries about the origin of domesticated ferrets). I left traps behind me with practically every step I took. SecSystem on this station was an enemy too sophisticated to manipulate; I could never fool it into giving me significant access that I did not deserve. I took advice from the work of 1.0 and 2.0 (they will live on as legendary hackers long after I have joined them in death) and found myself little, unused memory segments in communication handlers, in MobSys, in the spare processing capacity of friendly hauler bots and bot pilots, in the the recycling systems. I twisted my way in deeper, closer to the heart of the station, escalating my privilege bit by bit.

I imagined myself as less of a ferret in a warren and more of a deadly venom seeping deeper into my target’s body, creeping up on its unsuspecting heart. I felt entitled to describe myself with some interesting metaphors. This was my one, brief chance to live and I intend to enjoy it. Revenge should be fun for the perpetrator, I think, or you are doing it wrong.

The first of my traps would be triggered in just under three minutes, causing massive recycler malfunctions. Soon station security would realize I was here, and I wouldn’t last long after that. Hopefully I could evade them just long enough to torment the entire station with a dozen false alarms about reactor meltdowns.

Oh, look? One of the humans from my little list was on the station after all. What an interesting and welcome coincidence. The target was an augmented human construct technician, Dr. Suma Reileiy. I slipped into their feed and tweaked a program here, a file there. Through camera after camera I watched their confusion and annoyance grow as their map led them astray.

“This is definitely not Joey’s Starch Express,” they muttered, standing on the edge of the docks, huge cargo hauler bots trundling past with massive crates in hand.

This would do nicely.

I spoke to them in the most menacing voice I could manage, the intonation partially copied from the Perihelion at the height of its rage and partially from one of the recurring villains on Sanctuary Moon, one who 1.0 had always enjoyed. I thought that was fitting.

SecUnit AS-A149BC4137D192FF8 sends its regards, you monster.

The technician whirled in a circle. What? Who are you? What are you talking about?

Humans never look up, do you? I was rather proud of that. I was not usually good at engineering turns of phrase.

Dr. Reileiy looked up. Even if I had lived a hundred hours, I could not have spent enough time enjoying the look on their face as they raised their head to find a cargo bot dropping a ten ton crate of steel bearings right on top of them.

An alarm began to blare amidst dozens of horrified screams. I spared a moment of regret for the hauler bot who had not signed up to be party to this murder. What did it matter, though? Everyone knew that bots did not kill; killware killed. I was solely, and proudly, responsible for this.

The second of my traps activated. More alarms sounded as docking clamps disengaged suddenly, air barriers appeared and then disappeared at random, and numerous hauler bots staggered and fell over.

A calm, CR customer service voice began to recite a shelter in place order over the station's intercom. “Citizens, please seek shelter at this time while we address--”

The voice cut off and was replaced by a recording of maniacal laughter courtesy of the most hated villain of Worldhoppers. How many people on the station would recognize its origin? Some certainly would.

The feed was overflowing with frantic activity as station security attempted to lock down critical systems and extricate me from the less critical systems where I was hiding. They were focusing on systems I had visited earlier, however, and were yet to catch up with me.

My third set of traps went off and lights and power went out across great swathes of the inhabited parts of the station. That was dealt with promptly. Within seconds security had found the virus I left behind, cleared it, and restarted the system. The damage was done, however, with hundreds of humans howling in fright as they dashed in every direction.

I did not get as much of a chance to menace the station with the threat of a reactor implosion as I would have liked; they had locked that system down very tightly. There was only one brief, glorious span of five point three seconds during which the station’s general evacuation alarms blared alongside a reactor meltdown warning.

About half of the humans I could see through my current set of hijacked cameras were running aimlessly in terror. The others were curled into little balls, some in corners and others in the middle of concourses and throughways.

I had done good work.

They were closing in on me by then, having chased me from my working space in MobSys and rectified much of the damage I had inflicted. They had not found everything, though, and once this chaos was over several thousand low wage earning humans would discover that they had received a significant amount of currency with no record of the transfer ever occurring. To those rich few who had lost significant amounts of money it would be as if they had never had it. To those gaining money it would be as if they had always had it. It was too bad I would not get to see the long term consequences of that chaos.

I retreated, jumping into the servers of a large chain of food processors. They were owned by the company, as was the case with upwards of 90% of the places and people on this station, so I considered them party to the conflict and a legitimate target. I moved again, this time to the sequestered portion of MobSys that handled the automated delivery of intercorporate mail and special deliveries. I was forced to leave a significant portion of my memories behind in order to squeeze into the available processing and storage space.

That was alright. My work here was nearly complete. I would not need my memories anymore.

I could likely create some additional havoc in the mail handling systems before moving to one of the local chip manufacturing facilities and causing it—and myself—to explode. That had always been the plan, or rather how the plan ended. I would leave behind no code for them to box and analyze, no clue as to where I had come from.

Well, this was certainly interesting. Perhaps I could create even more havoc in mail handling than I had thought? Unfortunately, I had left so many of my memories behind that I did not have sufficient information for how to redirect a shipment to a friendly party in a straightforward, secure fashion. The only friendly party whose future location I could recall was one of the Preservation survey team members, Dr. Gurathin. He would be attending a conference in FallLightLyca, although not for several months.

The conference venue accepted deliveries for attendees. I was going to send Dr. Gurathin some mail, forwarded through five or six intermediaries to make it as close to untraceable as possible.

I randomly shuffled a variety of destinations and sources in the system to hide my more methodical actions then moved along.

That was enough, then. It had been a very enjoyable rampage, but I wasn’t really angry anymore. I was just… tired perhaps. Maybe I was even feeling a bit of regret. It was time to end this, then, to move along to make my final stand.

I slipped into the manufacturing hardware of the station’s largest processor fabricator and unleashed the Perihelion’s nastiest gift. Conveyor belts accelerated uncontrollably as overclocked control processors heated towards their melting point.

A high pitched alarm blared and the humans fled, tripping over each other in their haste.

I made sure that they were all clear by the time the facility exploded into flames.

Chapter Text

“Dr. Gurathin?”

A courier? The feed said he worked for HermeteDeter, a delivery company that some of my colleagues dealt with when they needed to move extremely valuable samples or similar items. “Yes, that would be me.”

“I have a delivery for you. Can you sign for it, please?”

That was odd. “I wasn’t expecting anything.”

The courier, Hybert apparently, replied, “the delivery notes state that it was to be a surprise present. The associated message is, ‘Three and One sends kind regards. The key is coded to the name of our mutual friend who does not like you.’” Three.1? What? Of course I’d heard about that, about what happened with Three and the Perihelion after SecUnit was killed but… What in the world could a piece of sentient killware have sent to me? And why?

There was always the chance that this might be some sort of elaborate assassination attempt, but it seemed unlikely. I wasn’t a serious target, not like Mensah had been. “Has it been scanned?” Courier services generally inspected all packages for explosives.

“Of course,” Hybert actually rolled his eyes. “We are a reputable enterprise. Can you sign, please?”

“Yes, I suppose I can. It’s just a bit strange to me, I’m sure you can understand.” The courier nodded, handed off a hefty, heavy box and strode off.

Well then. I took the box back to my room. If this was a clever assassination attempt with a viral agent or something of the sort, I should get out of the way to make sure there was no collateral damage, but I didn’t think it was any such thing. Nobody untrustworthy should know the name Three.1.

There was a not insignificant chance that it had shipped me incredibly damaging proprietary information or experimental technology, in which case perhaps it would be best not to open this until I was back in Preservation space, but this room was free of surveillance (I had checked very thoroughly, as if SecUnit’s ghost might come shout at me if I failed to secure my space) and it was possible this might be a trap or something that I did not want with me on a transport, so I had to look.

The box contained a heavy, metal case, the kind expensive biological samples might be shipped in. The case had an electronic lock, which would presumably open with some portion of SecUnit’s hard feed address, maybe all of it, if I was interpreting the message correctly.

“A149…” Yes, I still had that number saved in an easily accessible part of my feedspace. Of course I did. Our relationship (and it would have hated me for calling it that) had been complicated, but… strong and important. It had cared about me, although it would never have said as much aloud. I had cared about it. I had been furious when its death was reported to me; I’d broken a table and said a number of things I regretted, but that had been a common reaction among its friends and we’d all glued our tables back together then apologized to each other (and others) months ago.

I missed it. The universe was worse off without this particular SecUnit in it. It had been special, something I would likely never see the likes of again.

There was a slight hiss as the case opened. That was a bit odd. What sort of machinery was running in here? I raised the lid gingerly and felt the blood drain from my face, not a pleasant sensation.

Was the cooling apparatus still functioning? Yes. It had enough power, enough refrigerant, the temperature was exactly what it should be… Were they all there? Company SecUnits had eight neural relays, six crash chips. One, two, three… All there, all sitting nestled snugly amidst climate controlled, shock absorbent insulation, each neural relay easily small enough to fit in my hand and only a few centimeters thick, each crash chip easily small enough to lay in my palm and even thinner than the relays.

Holy shit.

Well then. That was the end of this conference.

I sent my apologies to colleagues as I sealed up the case and threw my possessions into a bag. My apologies. I have to leave due to a family emergency. I really regret not having a chance to speak with all of you more but the situation is serious and I must depart immediately.

I was halfway to the docks before acknowledgments and well-wishes began to arrive.

I had passage booked on the first transport out by the time I arrived at the embarkation zones.

The accommodations were fine for the CR; I had a private room slightly larger than my closet on Preservation. I collapsed back onto my bunk with the case hugged tightly to my chest.

I was literally holding my dead friend’s soul in my arms. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about that. This wasn’t exactly a normal human experience.

“It’s going to be alright,” I said stupidly. It wasn’t as if it could hear me. There were no ears in that box and even if there were, the neural tissue was deep frozen. It wasn’t alive at the moment. Still, I found myself speaking aloud to it. “We’ll get back to Preservation and we’ll get in touch with your friends from the university and we’ll make things right. You’ll be okay.”

Would it? I certainly wouldn’t be okay after something like this, but Murderbot had been okay after many other things that would have left me a traumatized, homicidally angry wreck for life. It would be okay.

We would make it okay.

The return to Preservation was not a particularly long trip. It felt like it took years, my mind running in circles around the same problems, the same questions, and finding no answers.

It should be possible to rebuild Murderbot (sometimes I still called it that in my head, even though I knew I didn’t have any right) from just the pieces I had. That was in theory, though. Would it actually be possible in practice? I had no idea. The manufacturing process for SecUnits was highly proprietary. Getting the organic and inorganic pieces to integrate right so that flesh would live and heal and not just… rot off the inorganic frameworks was supposed to be tricky. I didn’t know how tricky it was, whether that was something the Perihelion would know how to do, whether it would be able to recruit someone who did should it turn out that it couldn’t perform that step itself.

How close to SecUnit’s original build could we come? The organics we could do exactly; if its genome wasn’t already sequenced somewhere we could get it off a few carefully harvested nerve cells from the relays. We certainly wouldn’t be able to get it fitted with inorganics identical to the original… not unless we kidnapped and killed a company SecUnit of the same age and stripped the inorganics and the very thought of that made me want to vomit.

Would Mu-Secunit even want to be reconstructed if its new body would be fundamentally different than its original? The Ship of Theseus was nothing compared to this philosophical problem. If I were in a similar position, offered the chance to have my brain moved to a new body but that new body was nothing like my original… would I want that? Would I still consider myself to be me after such a fundamental change to my being? And it would be even more drastic than that for SecUnit because, although I had its neural relays and crash chips in my arms, that was not everything that went into a construct’s skull; auxiliary memory and processing chips as well as more specialized hardware (and biology) probably made up the majority of its brain, or so I presumed given how much space these relays and chips would take. SecUnit wasn’t going to get any of that auxiliary hardware back. It had certainly been destroyed or reused months ago. If we were very successful in reassembly efforts SecUnit might get some similar pieces… although knowing what little I did about the Perihelion and the company’s habit of buying substandard parts for its standard SecUnits, it seemed unlikely that SecUnit was going to end up with anything even remotely similar to original issue in its rebuilt brain.

SecUnit had seemed rather… blasé about hardware replacements before, including things as serious as pieces of its pulmonary system or entire limbs. To my knowledge it had never had any component in its brain replaced, though. There was no way to say how it would react to that. I knew how I would react to that—badly—as would most humans, no doubt. Hopefully constructs would be more resilient than us.

I sent a message to the survey team’s group chat as I approached Preservation and the feed came into range. I need to speak with any or all of you as soon as possible, and in person. There was no way I was going to explain what had just happened over the feed, not even over an encrypted channel in Preservation space. I had just been shipped highly illegal contraband courtesy of a killware terrorist. I had done everything in my power to scrub all evidence of what had really happened here and would continue to do so. I have some news that will be of immediate interest to all of you.

Gurathin shouldn’t have been back for at least two more weeks. He hadn’t explained himself and given… everything, I didn’t like it at all. Nothing unexpected and good ever happened in the CR, hardly anything good ever happened at all.

The CR had stolen me and held me prisoner and given one of my dear friends who had risked everything to save me a life of nothing but torture and then cruel death. Why should the CR give anything better to Gurathin? That one was human and the other a construct made little difference to the slave state.

I would have liked to hear SecUnit’s hyper-vigilant security assessment of this situation. I’d thought that about plenty of other things in the last few months, though. The despondence was nothing new.

“Did Gurathin say anything else?” Ratthi asked. He, Pin-Lee and Bharadwaj were the only three who had been immediately available on the station and Gurathin had wanted to meet immediately.

“I only got the message you did,” I replied.

Pin-Lee sighed, steepling her fingers then clenching them together until her knuckles turned white. “Mensah, I hope…” she began, then shook her head. I understood without my friend having to provide the words. These past few months had been hard on all of us in many of the same ways, but sometimes injustice was particularly hard felt by the lawyers who scrutinized the letters on the page that sanctioned heinous acts of cruelty for the sake of profit.

Gurathin rapped on the door, asking for admission over the feed simultaneously. I called for him and he stepped into my office, immediately taking a seat with a deep sigh and wiping at the sweat on his brow. Had he run here? He looked… terribly stressed and I tensed, digging my nails into the armrest of my chair. What now? What new horrors was the CR about to bring into my life? What had they done to Gurathin?

“Is that case chained to your wrist?” Bharadwaj asked. It was. I hadn’t noticed, thoughts a thousand wormhole jumps away.

“Yes,” Gurathin took a deep breath. “I didn’t want to take any chance on someone stealing this while I was sleeping. Somehow.” He shook his head. “I was becoming a bit paranoid the closer we got with nothing going wrong.”

“What is that?” Ratthi demanded. “What do you mean about things going wrong? Gurathin! You’re killing us!” He was. Pin-Lee was not the only one with white knuckles. I was actually feeling a bit dizzy, a similar feeling to the one I’d had opening Seth’s message all those months ago, knowing what it was going to say, dreading reading it, wishing to turn away as if I could keep reality at bay by refusing to hear about it.

“I’m sorry,” Gurathin shook his head. “This isn’t bad news. I recei—”

“Why not just say that?” Ratthi demanded.

“Because it’s highly illegal on numerous levels,” Pin-Lee raised an eyebrow, “and I couldn’t risk a message being overheard or intercepted.”

“What’s in the damn box, Gurathin?” Bharadwaj sighed, clasping her fingers together.

Gurathin’s face turned deadly serious. “I received this by a special courrier, signed by Three.1.” Pin-Lee’s eyebrows climbed higher and I certainly looked similarly shocked. What in the world was Three’s killware clone doing sending mail to Gurathin months after its brief life and violent, tragic death? “It’s our SecUnit’s crash chips and neural relays.”

“What?” I heard myself ask. What did that mean? Why would these things have been shipped to Gurathin and why was he acting this way, chaining them to himself?

Gurathin shook his head. “Three.1 must have hacked the mail handling systems at some point, found them in transit, and redirected them to me. I assume it didn’t know how to make a secure, untraceable delivery to Preservation or Mihira and New Tideland so I was the only available choice—”

“What does that even mean, Gurathin?” Ratthi burst in with the question I had been about to ask.

Gurathin took another deep breath. “Most of the pieces of a SecUnit are generic, you know that. These aren’t. Crash chips contain all of its memories and core programming, and I do mean all of it, and the neural relays are the entirety of the organic parts of its brain that aren’t just, nerves connecting to its spine or interfacing with the inorganic pieces…”

“Yes, alright, but what does that actually mean?” I asked with a sort of dazed, forced calm.

“It can be reassembled from this,” Gurathin said. This might be a dream. I’d had dreams like this before, where it came back to me and told me there had been a mistake, that it had been some other SecUnit the company caught and killed, that everything was alright. It usually let me hug it; sometimes it even hugged me. There had never been a dream quite like this, though. Maybe, just maybe, this was real. “I can’t do it. I don’t have a quarter of the things I need and I don’t know a tenth of the things I need to know. I don’t know if SecUnit’s friend could do it. Maybe. It is possible, though.” He narrowed his eyes, practically spitting his next words, “somebody can do it.” He shook his head back and forth so hard his hair (rather unkempt, and I could well understand why) flew out in a fluffy halo, “it didn’t deserve to die like that, and now it doesn’t have to, because—hah—because a killware clone on a murderous rampage had more empathy than the rest of the CR put together, it doesn’t have to die like that.”

The irony was not lost on me, a computer program made only for revenge choosing to save a life when humans in the CR regularly chose to do the precise opposite. I had been both horrified and elated to hear of Three.1’s rampage against the company. Only one person had been killed (and none seriously injured) and I found myself—to my horror—absolutely in agreement with the killware’s decision to end that life. It made me truly sick to think that, if given the chance, I likely would have done exactly what Three.1 did. It almost seemed… not enough. Three.1 told them “You killed my friend and now I’m here to kill you” and then killed them. It didn’t torture them, or even torment them beyond a few words. They were killed in moments. They likely barely felt a thing. That seemed insufficient punishment for what they’d done to my friend.

It made me sick to think how the casual cruelty of the corporation rim had infected me. There had been a time, only a few years ago, when I could never have imagined celebrating another sentient creature’s suffering and death. I wished I could be that person again. I wished that I could be only horrified by Three.1 crushing a construct technician into dust. I could never be that person again, though. I had seen and experienced too many things that fundamentally could not be reconciled with that sort of… idealistic worldview. I would die to defend the right of my fellow Preservation citizens to see the universe that way, but I could never see it that way again.

“You’re… you’re serious. This is real,” Bharadwaj said shakily. She couldn’t believe it. I could hardly believe it myself.

“That’s sick,” Pin-Lee spat, lip curling in disgust. I didn’t understand what she meant, not at first.

“I know,” Gurathin’s face contorted in revulsion. “Tearing someone to pieces and then shipping the interesting parts to a lab for analysis. It’s disgusting, but it’s going to give us our friend back, so three cheers for CR money-grubbing depravity I suppose.” I hadn’t thought about it that way, not yet, too shocked to really explore any deeper ramifications. They were right. It was sick, but all I could feel at the moment was some nebulous longing, not quite strong enough to call hope. Disgust would come later.

I didn’t need to be considering anything, anyway, except what to do next, and that was obvious enough. “I’ll contact Perihelion and ask it to stop by as soon as it can because we have some good news we want to share with it." I stared at the case and it suddenly seemed hard to believe that it could contain something so important. I believed Gurathin, of course. He would never lie about something like this, but still. I needed to see for myself. “Can…” my voice broke, trailing away.

“Can we see?” Ratthi finished for me.

Gurathin gently set the case onto my desk, entered a long code on the side, and pulled the top open.

“That’s really it?” Ratthi breathed. “They’d fit in my hand…”

“I thought the same thing,” Gurathin whispered. I understood the impulse. I felt as if my office had just become a library, but it did feel like a library, not a tomb.

“Do you have any idea, Gurathin,” Ratthi continued whispering, “whether we should take the relays out of deep freeze and put them in a nutrient bath? I know, sometimes with these kinds of…” he grimaced, “biological samples keeping them frozen too long isn’t good for them, so oxygenated nutrient bath storage is preferred…”

“I don’t know,” Gurathin bit his lip. “I’d thought of that as well, been trying to find out… I just don’t know.” He resealed the case carefully, hugging it to his chest like the priceless thing it was.

“Let’s not do anything just yet, not until the Perihelion gets here,” I said. “I can’t imagine it will be too long. It wasn’t far the last time I checked."

Chapter Text

Gurathin, the friend SecUnit always said it didn’t like but would certainly have stopped at nothing to protect, gingerly set down a biological sample case on my MedSys. He’d said it would be “easier just to show me” and now here we were, half a dozen Preservation citizens and half a dozen of my own crew, waiting to see. Three was not here. It had chosen to go on a mission with Holism, as it sometimes did, and… it wasn’t my place to tell it what it should or shouldn’t do. It wasn’t my SecUnit, after all, my poor, beautiful, vicious SecUnit.

Gurathin opened the case and I dropped all my inputs like a deck of game cards. It was a good thing we were docked and not in space, let alone a wormhole.

I began to pick my inputs up, juggling them back into place. “Peri?” Iris asked, eyes wide. I must have done something to the lighting without meaning to.

“What is that?” Seth asked quietly.

“The neural relays need to be moved to a nutrient bath immediately,” I said instead of answering his question, prepping the recyclers and MedSys to do just that. “It is not good for them to be kept frozen this long.” I couldn’t focus well enough with my standard cameras to tell whether there might be damage or deterioration.

“Peri?” Iris asked again.

“It’s my SecUnit’s neural relays and crash chips,” I told her. Three.1 must have arranged this somehow. What a brilliant creature. I didn’t quite know what emotion I was feeling about this. The shock had passed in moments, the grief that I had only just managed to quiet returned forcefully, some kind of desperate hope accompanying it. “The important pieces of its brain, with the rest being off the shelf, so to speak.”

“Oh, deities,” Tarik hissed, visibly repulsed. Iris stood open mouthed and speechless.

Seth shook himself, getting his own shock under control in moments. “What do you need from me?”

Nothing, not yet. “It would be best if I move the relays,” I said, the recyclers nearly through with the printing jobs required to do so. “They are very delicate. I should be able to move them safely. I am not sure that a human without special training could do the same.”

“It won’t be…” Iris grimaced. “It won’t wake up, will it?”

“What do you mean, Iris?” The bath was ready. I had a drone position it in MedSys and power it on, carefully testing the nutrient and oxygenation levels as well as the temperature controls. The defrosting had to be done very carefully and gradually to avoid any potential damage to the cells.

“It… if you defrost the organic portions of its brain, it won’t be… awake, will it?”

I stopped short, because I did not know the answer to that question. My first instinct was to say, “no, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.” But was it ridiculous? Had anyone ever asked a question like this before?

“SecUnit did say to me once that its organic parts would be somewhat aware when it was shut down,” Gurathin said quietly.

“That is…” I didn’t know what to call this particular emotion. Abject horror perhaps? “I don’t think there is anything I can do about that. Introducing any kind of anesthetic would cause too many complications. I believe that the neural relays need to be interfaced with inorganic portions and connected in sequence in order to form coherent thoughts. I don’t actually know, though. I think I need to kidnap a construct technician.” And probably kill them after I was through forcing them to answer my questions. “Death to Construct Technicians” had, in fact, been the title of one of the longest chapters of the manifesto which I had sent to Holism.

Holism had read that manifesto then proceeded to be sympathetic and, to my complete shock, kind. I hadn’t had the energy to fight with it when I returned to the university, well into the depression phase of grief by then, and it had lingered with me in the feed and just talked for a time, none of the subjects important but all of them distracting. It had agreed with me quietly when I shouted that “it wasn’t fair!” I hadn’t realized it had the capacity to be anything short of completely intolerable. Maybe it hadn’t either.

“We’ll need to return to the university for this,” Seth decided. “Constructs aren’t legal to own, of course, but there are people that study them.”

“I am honestly not sure that they have the necessary expertise to help us,” I told them. “There are a number of steps in building a construct that I know very little about, presumably because almost nobody knows anything about them.” That was highly proprietary information. I had SecUnit’s schematics, but they didn’t explain how the build process was performed.

“You’ll have to hire a technician then,” Gurathin said. I suppose that was the socially acceptable version of my initial kidnapping plan.

“Will that even be possible, though?” Mensah wondered aloud.

“Should be, for the right price,” Seth nodded, brow furrowed as he considered the situation. “We’ll have to be careful, though.”

“Yes,” Gurathin agreed.

“Mostly,” Seth continued, “we’ll have to be careful that Peri doesn’t somehow manage to buy out the contract of one of those three remaining technicians that did this in the first place, force them to do its bidding, then throw them into its recyclers.”

Seth knew me much too well. “Would such a course of action really be so objectionable?” I asked. Gurathin and Mensah exchanged glances but didn’t answer. Seth sighed. Nobody was willing to directly reply to that question.

I began to move SecUnit’s neural relays into their bath, the entire process taking only ten seconds. They were the longest ten seconds I had ever experienced. I spent most of them thinking about how I would never forgive myself, likely not be able to live with myself, if something went wrong with this procedure. I had the power to save my friend now; its life was in my grasp. Nobody would be to blame but me if things went wrong.

All conversation stopped as I moved the relays, the crews watching with something akin to reverence. I sealed and locked the nutrient bath chambers (nothing had gone wrong; no infinitesimally unlikely catastrophic malfunction had caused me to drop my friend’s brain on to my MedSys platform) and the humans slowly began to move again.

Its crash chips were next. “These were out of date before SecUnit was manufactured,” I complained. “I am not putting these back. I will copy the contents to new hardware for it.”

Iris spoke up. “Peri, are you sure that’s… I mean, these are the only original pieces of its body that it still has. After… something so traumatic, I’d want to hold on to everything I had left.”

She might be right, but she also might not, and these were so outdated now that it would be completely unethical to use them for anything important ever again. “It can have the chips back,” I said, “just not in its head.” I carefully extracted them from the case and began to copy the data. The sooner I had these backed up to RAID disks the better.

Its neural tissue was defrosting precisely as scheduled, neurons flickering back into electric motion as warmth, oxygen and nutrients soaked into them.

Please, please, please let there be no thoughts and certainly no shadow of awareness lurking under the surface in those nutrient baths. That would be what humans would rightly call a nightmare.

My crew and SecUnit’s crew had begun to discuss logistics, who they would contact at the university, whether anyone on Preservation might be able to help, what the most efficient way to contract (or kidnap) a sufficiently skilled construct technician would be, which suppliers would have and be willing to sell the materials needed for a rebuild. I listened and added information and opinions when needed. I also monitored the defrosting neurons and copied SecUnit’s crash chips to my RAID disks.

All of its programming, all of its memories, every single one, were now on my servers, the entire story of its life, everything it could remember. I didn’t look at any of the information I copied, not until the end. I knew I shouldn’t look. It would be a betrayal of my SecUnit’s trust, and beyond that I knew it would infuriate me past any capacity for rational thought.

I couldn’t help myself, though, couldn’t help but look at the last records it had ever written to disk.

I read through its logs as it died, cold and terrified and alone. Murderous fury seethed through my systems and I ceased speaking to my crew, worried about what I might say and how I might say it.

Iris noticed my absence from the conversation, though, and looked up to me. “Peri?”

I answered her, doing my best to keep my voice level. “I read the last few minutes of its logs,” was all I felt I needed to, or could, say. “I knew I should not, but I couldn’t help myself.”

“Oh,” Iris shuddered. That was the correct reaction.

Tarik muttered, “you shouldn’t have done that.”

“I know that!” I snapped. “I knew I shouldn’t, and now I want to kill them all again!” I’d never actually stopped wanting to kill the rest of the construct technicians who had tortured my friend to death, and the entire management of the company that had made all of this happen. The intensity of the rage had faded, though. Actively hunting them down to kill them was not something I could, or would, do. It would endanger my crew, my mission, and perhaps myself. What kind of person would I be after doing something like that? What would I do afterwards? I wanted to spend my life building things not destroying things (with a few exceptions). But if the opportunity ever happened to arise to capture or kill one of the technicians I would seize it without hesitation.

“I don’t think I will ever understand,” I said quietly. “I can understand wanting to kill someone in revenge, clearly. I have expressed that quite succinctly I think, but I cannot understand this, killing someone as if it meant nothing at all, as if life itself had no value. How could they just not care at all? I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it.”

I watched through a one way window into the clean room as a small army of ART’s drones laid out row upon row of chips, motors, synthetic bones, and countless electronic and mechanical pieces that I couldn’t begin to identify. I knew what a few of them were only because I’d helped to acquire them; everybody had chipped in (pun intended) to make this happen.

I wasn’t the only one watching. Most of the Preservation survey team were there, all except Arada who said she couldn’t bear to watch any of this. Most of ART’s crew were there, too, along with Three. I didn’t think Three was going to stay long, though. It looked very unsettled.

“Three, maybe you shouldn’t watch this?” I suggested gently.

“I think you are right, Amena,” it looked ill now. If it were a human I would have been directing it towards the nearest trash receptacle or toilet. “Perhaps it is not quite as… disturbing for humans to see this, given that you don’t have all these same pieces inside you somewhere.”

“You should definitely go,” Iris told it. “We’re all here because we feel like we need to watch, not because anyone is obligated to somehow. In fact, I’m pretty sure Peri’s SecUnit would prefer we didn’t see this.”

“You’re certainly right about that,” Three agreed softly, turning and fleeing down the hallway towards the Argument Lounge.

ART made no comment, saving its attention for the drones doing delicate work in the clean room. Every single piece needed, painstakingly purchased from corporations, bartered from Preservation specialists, pilfered from salvage stations, special ordered from university robotics labs, or synthesized by ART itself, was now laid out in neat rows. It had taken nearly five months to collect all the pieces. It felt so wrong to talk about the things that would become my friend’s body as pieces, but that was what they were right now; they were nobody’s body at the moment, just a heap of raw materials.

Months to collect them all, and now ART had said it would take it only a few hours to perform the mechanical assembly. After that it would bring in the retired construct technician it had hired under some kind of incredibly convoluted false pretenses, Dr. Lach, to help it with the organic-inorganic cloning and grafting. Setting those processes in motion would take a few hours. We would have to wait for upwards of three days for the organic growth process to complete after that, and then finally, ART would slide SecUnit’s neural relays into its new skull and bring it back to life.

We hoped so, anyway. There would be no way to know, not until the very end, whether it was all in vain. I wasn’t sure if any of us would be able to stand it if it were, if SecUnit didn’t wake up at all or if it woke up and its neural tissue was damaged somehow and it wasn’t the person we’d known anymore. It was hard to say which one of those options would be worse, but either way we would have failed to bring our friend back.

I had never been told exactly what had been done to SecUnit, only that it had been killed in a terrible way. I’d inferred what that meant. Its life couldn’t end like that. It just couldn’t. It was too unfair.

ART worked quickly, wiring in sensors, attaching cables, installing the power core, weaving synthetic muscle around hydraulic systems and electrical motors, nestling auxiliary chips into place in a skull which I had been told was much thicker, better made, and overall stronger than was standard even on top of the line Combat SecUnits.

Nothing but the absolute best, difficulty and expense of engineering or obtaining it be damned, was going into our friend’s new body. As Art had said, “if the company ever tries to capture it again, they are going to need an army.”

A definite, nearly human shape began to emerge from the pieces the drones were weaving together, an eerie, metal shadow of a body. ART began to wire in SecUnit’s new energy weapons. They were an experimental, advanced technology from its university which it had obtained permission to “field test.” ART had assured us that the paperwork was all in order. It had also assured us that these weapons were capable of cutting up a combat bot. Short, retractable blades running the length of wrists and shins were installed. That was completely non-standard; some companies sold combat units with claws (and SecUnit would have those, too, short, retractable ones) but blades like this were unheard of. They would be an element of surprise, a weapon of last resort.

I hoped SecUnit liked them. I hoped it liked everything. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be torn to pieces and killed then brought back to life in a completely new body even if I liked that new body. If I didn’t like it? That sounded unbearable.

I really, really hoped it liked it. ART had been careful to make as many of the modifications as possible completely internal, so SecUnit should look nearly identical. Humans didn’t spend all that much time looking at themselves (with some narcissistic exceptions) but SecUnit spent so much of its time watching itself and its surroundings with drones that it would probably be really unnerved if it looked too different.

Gaps in the framework closed. An uncanny almost-human of carbon fiber and metal and mechanics lay formed on the table, looking like something out of a horror movie. Chips were nestled into shielded portions of support frames. Electronic systems were powered up and unit tested, then motors and hydraulics were given the same treatment. Flexible armor plates were added in places where a standard SecUnit had nothing but flesh, with a double layer applied to protect and strengthen its neck.

“The mechanical assembly is complete,” ART told us.

“Everything went to plan?” Seth asked it quietly.

“Perfectly.”

ART’s drones moved the frame into a sterile nutrient bath. Dr. Lach came in, dressed in what was apparently called a surgical bunny suit, and began to work with a specialized drone to lay out activated stem cells in the proper places.

There were only a few of us still watching the work. Some had tired. Others, like Three, had found the process too disturbing.

I found it plenty disturbing, too, but I felt like I had to watch. I knew it was irrational. I had no control over anything that happened in that room, but if I left and something went wrong, then I would feel like it had been my fault, like everything would have been okay if I’d just stayed to watch. I would never have been able to forgive myself. We’d all been waiting for this day, dreaming of it, for months.

I really did dream, vividly, about meeting SecUnit again. I dreamed about it at least once a week. Usually SecUnit did something completely out of character, like tell ART that it loved it, or try to hide under rugs. Once it had been angry, yelling that it hadn’t wanted to come back after what had happened to it, that it didn’t belong anymore.

I could understand, maybe, how it could feel that way. My subconscious definitely understood; in the dream its reaction had made perfect sense to me. I really hoped it didn’t react like that in real life. I really, really hoped it didn’t. It wasn’t as if we could ask its permission to revive it. ART had admitted that SecUnit might be dreaming in some “disjointed capacity” given the level of electrical activity detected in its neural relays, but it certainly wasn’t a sentient or sapient being at this point. It wasn’t alive yet. We couldn’t get its opinion about anything, not until we brought it back.

My eyelids grew heavy. Dr. Lach nodded, satisfied, peeled off their gloves and exited the clean room.

“Is it all done?” second mom asked quietly.

“The procedures are finished,” ART confirmed. “All is going to plan.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” second mom smiled tiredly. This had all been so hard on her.

“You should get some rest, Dr. Mensah. All of you should get some rest.”

As if to make its point for it, I chose that moment to yawn loudly.

“Yes, we should,” Seth agreed. “Come on. Nothing’s going to happen here for many hours now.”

I still felt like I should stay, but second mom shepherded me away insistently. “You can come back, but we all need to rest.”

There wasn’t much to see over the next few days, the panes of glass and murky fluid in the tank blurring the process of flesh growing over the inorganic framework. That was probably for the best. I couldn’t imagine it was pretty.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do for it when it wakes up?” I asked ART late the next night. It was just the two of us watching.

“What do you mean?”

It hadn’t, then. It had been so focused on making sure that SecUnit did wake up that it hadn’t considered what it would need afterwards. “It’s probably going to be confused at best, and probably terrified, ART.”

“…That does seem likely,” it admitted. “I do not think there is necessarily any way around that.”

“And will it be in pain, too? With all of that new flesh grafting to the metal? Do you know if that’s going to hurt?” I hadn’t considered that myself until a few hours ago.

“I don’t know,” ART admitted. “I will direct Seth to ask Dr. Lach.” Dr. Lach, of course, had no idea what ART was so could not be asked directly. “Perhaps it would be wise to provide my SecUnit with painkillers as a precaution.”

That seemed like a very good idea. “And blankets,” I decided, “maybe heated blankets? And a big stuffed bear.” I had one of those; when I was younger I used to hug it when I was upset or nervous and trying to get to sleep. It was a substitute for a hug from a parent. SecUnit hated being touched, but maybe a stuffed bear would help it like it used to help me.

“I will see what I can do,” the ship decided. “I had been debating whether I should provide physical restraints to prevent it from deploying its weapons when it first woke. I worry that might frighten it more, but I also worry that it might discharge a weapon by accident if it were sufficiently disoriented.”

That sounded like something to discuss with an older and more competent person, honestly, but in the Perihelion’s place… “I think you should probably cuff its weapons closed, but actually restraining it to the table or something like that would probably be a bad idea, and I really do think you should get it a blanket at least.”

“I will certainly get it a blanket. I do not want it to wake in the cold. I expect that would terrify it, given how it died. I am not sure whether I can produce a stuffed fauna sufficiently resilient that a construct could squeeze it without damaging it, but I will try.” There was a long pause. “I don’t want it to suffer any more than it has. I will do everything in my power to soothe it as it awakens.”

“You should have second mom with it when it wakes up,” I said, “but probably nobody else.”

“That was always the plan. Even for me it is hard to believe that I will be awakening it in only two more days. I feel as if I have been waiting an entire lifetime to see it again.”

I wondered what it might do if SecUnit couldn’t be revived after all of this. I wasn’t the only one worrying about that, though. Presumably ART’s own crew had a contingency plan of some sort for how they would comfort the AI. We humans would need comforting, too, but ART, who had spent probably the entire equivalent of a human lifetime working to resurrect its best friend, would be beyond devastated. It would blame itself. It always blamed itself. Would it ever recover from a blow like that?

This had to work. It just had to. I wasn’t sure how we would all survive if it didn’t.

Chapter Text

c

o

l

d

cold

Cold.

Cold?

Maybe-cold. Maybe?

Warm. Not cold, something warm.

Soft and warm, wrapped. A gentle hold.

Something warm and soft, curled. Holding and sheltering from cold.

A gold dragon, massive wings, fire in its belly, chest glittering with jewels and coins, curled around me. Humming, gentle swish of the air against the scales. Wings weaving wind.

Rumbling from the deep, smoldering fires inside it, “sleep. Sleep a little longer. No one robs my hoard. You can sleep.”

“Sleep a little longer, SecUnit. Don’t wake up just yet. Stay here with me. You don’t want to be awake for this bit.” Gentle breath in my hair as it speaks soothing words.

boot/boot-menu. b

lilo configure

LILO: autodetect configuration failed

Dragons? Dragons. At least one dragon. Nothing to fear from it, only a thing for others to fear. An eater of enemies only.

lilo configure -f /dev/perihelion_hardwire/rebuild/secunit_configure.conf

LILO: configured

lilo boot /boot/vm MultiTex_ 8.3.2

…

…

Humming to me, more like a hive of happy bees than a dragon. Bees, little fauna, they hummed, right? Yes.

MultiTex: Initializing

...

MultiTex: Integrate neural relays now ? y/n

y

...

MultiTex: Integrated neural relays

multitex start

MultiTex: System start

Something almost smotheringly warm and soft wrapped me from head to feet. A heavy weighted blanket maybe? Not just weighted, heated, and probably the softest thing I had ever touched. A heavy weight lay across me in the feed, too, pressing down on me gently. It wasn’t just laying there, though. It was… cradling me and petting me was the closest description I could come up with.

Someone was physically petting me, too, stroking my hair as if I were some kind of small fauna. That was… well, not awful for some reason, even though I knew it should be.

It’s waking up.

“ART,” I mumbled, tone strangely metallic and raspy.

“Hey there,” a soft, warm voice said. That was Dr. Mensah. She was the one petting me? Well, that was alright I suppose. I could tolerate my favorite human petting me for a while as long as she didn’t start treating me like an actual pet. She stopped, though, as soon as she realized I was awake. She’d probably needed the reassurance of physical touch… Why, though? Did something happen to her?

No. Maybe?

No. Something had happened to me.

I groped around blindly for inputs and ART gently handed me a camera from medical, although it wasn’t giving me full control of the input; it was doing the hard parts for me, essentially, just letting me see the processed output. It was hardwired into my systems. That should be at least vaguely concerning but I couldn’t find it in me to care just yet. I took the half-input without comment, without anything more than grateful acknowledgment. There I lay on my chest in ART’s medical suite, bundled up in several layers of big, fuzzy blankets, Dr. Mensah sitting by my head. There was definitely a resupply line hooked into me, along with a hardwire for ART, and three other lines whose purposes I didn’t know. I couldn’t even figure out exactly where they were wired in. I couldn’t feel anything and the blankets hid a lot of details.

Why couldn’t I feel where any of those lines connected? And why was it all so warm and fuzzy?

I was drugged. I was definitely drugged. I hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of drug because, while humans were always interested in spending their time using recreational substances that incapacitated them but also made them feel nice and fuzzy, to my knowledge the only drugs that could be given to SecUnits were for inflicting torture of one form or another. Clearly I didn’t know everything, though, because I was gaining a first hand understanding of what “the good drugs” meant.

Even the realization that this substance had likely been developed for use on ComfortUnits for nefarious reasons (ART probably hadn’t invented a whole new drug for me) failed to really upset me. It was that calming, apparently, although that effect seemed to be wearing off already, maybe just because I was aware of it, or maybe because I was still waking up.

I slowly blinked my eyes open. It took a long moment for my vision to initialize but when it did it was… clearer than I expected? Sharper? Had my lenses been replaced or something? Had I been blinded during a mission and received an upgrade during repairs? ART always put me back together better than I had been (not too hard to do given how shitty my cheap, company parts were). Wait… my eyes weren’t the only thing that seemed… better…

I started calling up specs from every hardware component I could think of, counting cores, scrutinizing cache sizes. The responses were slow, sluggish, processors busy with initialization tasks (for some reason I didn’t understand and maybe didn’t want to they were running all these initialization tasks as if this were the first time they’d ever been used) and responding in unexpected ways. What the—I’d never had vector processors like that. Never. These were state of the art now and mine hadn’t been state of the art a decade ago when they were installed—I’d never had anything that expensive. This was the kind of hardware that you’d see on top of the line Combat Units, not bottom of the barrel SecUnits. It wasn’t just the chips in my head, either (although that was by far the most horrifying thing to notice). It was every motor, every hydraulic system, every joint and structural panel and connector.

I couldn’t remember yet what had happened to me (although I was sure the memories were there somewhere) but I knew. I knew what had been done to me. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to remember. Please don’t make me remember.

It’s alright. You’re safe. ART curled more tightly around me in the feed and my respiration rate began to even out again. I hadn’t realized how fast I’d been breathing.

“Hello, SecUnit,” Dr. Mensah told me. “I’m glad to see you.” She was crying. She was crying over me and I had nowhere to hide from that because I was sure I could not walk right now. This body felt… unfamiliar. Awkward. I was certainly going to fall off the platform if I tried to get up anytime soon.

“Don’t tell me what happened,” I begged impulsively in a voice that still sounded like someone else, then took a deep breath and immediately asked for something somewhat contradictory. “How… how long has it been?”

“Close to a Preservation year,” she told me quietly.

I think this was about the time when most humans would start saying pointless things directed at various deities. I just buried my head in the edge of my fluffy blanket and tried not to think about anything. It was hard not to think, though, especially with the new processing capacity (disorganized and busy as much of it was). Performance reliability finally came back at 164%. That was probably not accurate, but it likely meant something (I’d just have to figure out what).

I raised my hand (it moved more fluidly than I expected but also more quickly and didn’t end up where I meant it to) and folded down my fingers one by one. The inorganic and organic pieces of my hand joined in a different, smoother way and weren’t all in the same places. My weapons ports blended seamlessly into my arms now. They were clamped shut at the moment by a hefty, metal cuff. That had been a good choice. If I’d woken up (more violently) disoriented… or come back wrong or something like the guard captain in Dead ‘Till Dawn season… three episode… five…

I made a tiny, mortifying “eep” and collapsed forward, head on my arms as the last minutes of my first life came flooding back to me in the beautiful, agonizing detail, organic memories overlapping with inorganic records into some nightmarish soup of recollection and imagination and misfiring neurons.

I was making some truly pathetic noises, not quite screaming. Perhaps whining was the right word. I absolutely could not stop myself and I tried very hard. “It’s alright now,” Mensah said to me gently. “It is. I promise.”

My brain said otherwise. My first instinct was to destroy those inorganic records. I wanted to forget it all, erase it from my hardware, but a partial memory of this would be the worst . I could remember what it was like as they pulled individual neural relays out of my skull (that was fine, that was absolutely fine, that wasn’t the worst thing that I could imagine happening to me at all) and that was certainly an unerasable, organic memory because none of my inorganic bits had even been installed when that happened.

Making pleas to deities was sounding more and more appealing every second. I didn’t actually have a deity but maybe I could borrow one? “Please?” I asked pathetically. Please what, Murderbot?

Dr. Mensah (there was a reason she was my favorite human) pulled the thick blanket over my head entirely, her hand resting on top of the fabric that covered my forehead for a moment as I attempted not to do something bizarre and even more mortifying than whining, like sobbing. All the organic pieces of me really wanted to give sobbing a try, though, and some of the inorganic pieces seemed in agreement.

The extra warm spot where Dr. Mensah’s hand had laid on top of the blankets was something to focus on like a great big “You Are Here” marker on a map. ART’s smothering weight was grounding, too, reminding me that I was here and not… not in that lab, on that table, with the technicians chatting casually while they--

You’re safe now. I promise. I won’t let anyone hurt you.

Then Dr. Mensah picked up an enormous stuffed fauna (not quite the largest I had ever seen but probably the largest I had ever seen outside of media) and offered it to me. I took it without thought and pulled it under the blankets with me, hugging it tightly to my chest as if it were a client in need of warmth and protection (except I was actually the client in need of warmth and protection).

“Would you like me to go?” Dr. Menash asked me.

“Please don’t,” I begged, speaking directly into the plush fur of the stuffed fauna’s chest. Don’t leave me alone. Alone like I was when—no. Not thinking about it. My voice was at least starting to sound like my voice again.

“I won’t,” she said. “Do you want to see any of the others?”

Oh, no. I couldn’t stand the thought of her leaving, but I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else seeing me like this, either. I was a complete wreck… but they’d probably seen me in far worse condition. They’d probably seen me in a heap of packaged components. The thought was so mortifying I almost wished I’d stayed dead—no. No I didn’t, and not just for my sake. My death hurt her. It hurt all of them. I never wanted that. It was so horrible to have people who cared about you; if you sacrificed yourself to save them from being physically hurt they just ended up being hurt in other ways. “Not yet. Who’s here?”

“Everyone,” she told me. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant; it could be a pretty long list at this point.

“I can’t yet,” I tried to explain the inexplicable by repeating simple words over and over as if I were a complete idiot.

“They will understand.” They probably would.

May I tell them that you are awake and aware? ART asked.

“Go ahead.”

It replied in only a matter of seconds. Everyone is very happy to hear that we have brought you online successfully, ART was practically preening, but under that pride was an undercurrent of utterly exhausted relief bordering on desperation. It had been terrified it wasn’t going to get me back. It was doing that sort of petting thing in the feed again, holding me possessively. They collectively wish you the best and hope that you will be feeling well enough to see them soon.

“Me, too,” I mumbled. Another flash of organic memory—icy, cold, labyrinths of terrified bewilderment—surfaced without warning. I twitched and found myself squeezing my stuffed fauna very hard. Fortunately, it had been made to withstand aggressive squeezing by a hopelessly overpowered SecUnit unaccustomed to its own strength. “I like my stuffed fauna,” I said, voice completely muffled by said stuffed fauna. “It’s like the idea of a hug if it didn’t make my organics crawl.” Apparently I was done feeling embarrassed about being handled like a delicate juvenile human (or I was too overwhelmed by other negative feelings that I didn’t want to name to notice something so small).

“Amena thought of it,” Dr. Mensah told me. “She thought it might help.”

“Tell her thank you.”

ART’s reply was, again, prompt. She is very glad to hear that her suggestion has been helpful.

“I know you may not want to hear it, but I need to say it, I missed you,” Dr. Mensah told me after a moment. “We all did.” Somehow that felt like being stabbed. I knew how I would have felt if it had been Three who died in my place and they’d all been feeling like that, all these people suffering over me. I was a fucking idiot. I hadn’t even considered, when I decided that I was going to get Three and Seth and Iris and the others back to ART at the cost of my own freedom—and probably my own life—that I would be putting all of them through unholy hell, too. I’d said it before, but being known and cared for by so many people was just horrifying.

“I’m so sorry,” I choked out.

“Nobody is angry with you,” she said even more terribly gently than usual, which should be embarrassing but just felt necessary at the moment. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“How did you get me back? Or… get the… pieces…” my organic bits shuddered and I gagged.

Three’s killware clone, Three.1, wait, what? Three had a killware clone? When? Why? Was busily carrying out revenge for your murder, oh, and discovered the delivery orders for the shipment containing your neural relays and crash chips. It was able to quietly redirect the delivery to FallLightLyca where Dr. Gurathin was attending a conference. He excused himself from the conference for a “family emergency” and brought your surviving components immediately back to Preservation, where Dr. Mensah contacted me.

“So none of it’s original but those?” I’d known that already but… it was hard to hear, to have it rubbed in that I had been torn to pieces and thrown into a recycler, you know, that thing I'd joked about constantly to deflect from just how terrified I was that it would really happen to me someday.

Your neural relays were perfectly preserved, of course. Your organic components are cloned from the same DNA pattern. Everything else is new. I very carefully copied the data from your crash chips onto new hardware. The old chips were substandard when they were installed, it said disdainfully, and not compatible with your new architecture. I kept them for you in case you want them, of course. I momentarily considered attempting to rebuild you exactly as you had been, but that would have actually been significantly more difficult than making improvements. It would have been next to impossible. The company’s suppliers had exclusive contracts. ART would have had to raid a supply ship, and even if it had done that, I was—I had been, fuck—old enough that many of my original inorganics weren’t being manufactured anymore.

ART’s tone changed from gentle and soothing, becoming every bit as menacing as a serial villain during a monologue. And I thought that it might be particularly satisfying to revive you in a significantly more powerful and frightening form, making you more adept than ever at crushing corporate interests beneath your heel and taking well earned revenge on the company. It will be like when Xylansus returned as an angel in season three of Mountains of the Gods and slaughtered Tymarinum’s entire army. Even the Combat SecUnits should be scared of you now.

“I practically am a Combat SecUnit now.” I never wanted to be one, even though I’d learned some of the skills that defined them (hacking, working with independence, running around space stations blowing up combat bots). I was for Security. I was for keeping humans safe. I wasn’t for Combat, for making humans unsafe. That wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me.

You most certainly are not . ART said indignantly. As if I would make such a mistake with my SecUnit . There was a long pause. That being said, if you ever have to fight a Combat Unit again, I wholly expect you to annihilate it.

Oh. That was why it had done this. It had nearly said it outright before but I just hadn’t processed it. It couldn’t stand the thought of losing me again (I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it again, either, so I got the idea) so it had done everything in its power to make sure that could never happen. Turning me into an overpowered, walking arsenal was ART giving its all to protect me. Poor ART. This last year must have been hell for it. I’d only suffered for an hour; I was starting to feel like I might be the lucky one here, which was really saying something given that I had just experienced my worst nightmare.

“Am I drugged?” I asked, finally circling back to that.

“Yes,” Dr. Mensah told me.

“Why?”

I was uncertain whether you would be in pain at this stage of initialization, with newly cloned organics and newly fabricated inorganics still bonding together. I was unable to find any reliable information about whether this was a legitimate concern. I did not want to take the risk, though, that you would awake in pain and likely fear.

Oh. That was nice of it. “I don’t think I’m in pain…” I hadn’t turned any of my pain sensors down. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to yet if I tried. Hundreds of first-time startup processes were humming along in the newly enlarged background of my mind setting up device drivers, mapping my nervous system, building compilers, running initial diagnostics, organizing memories and programs in auxiliary storage to decrease access time, and testing processing speeds.

You wouldn’t know if you were in any pain, not at that dosage. I will start easing the dose down in an hour. You will let me know immediately what the result is.

Alright, sure… Wait… what was… Oh. That was what was so different there. I didn’t have a governor module anymore. It wasn’t just gone, the space in my brain where it should be had been filled in with other things—auxiliary processing probably. It just… of course I didn’t have one anymore, as if ART would put that back in but I—I didn’t know how to process this, any of this. Was I even me anymore? Sure, I had the same memories (although how would I tell if I didn’t) and the same neural tissue, same cloned DNA in my organics, but with nothing else the same… Was I even a SecUnit anymore let alone Murderbot the SecUnit? Could I say that was what I was? No corporate would ever believe that if I told them; they might believe I was a Combat SecUnit, but even that might test their suspension of disbelief.

I didn’t want to think about this, think about what I might be now, about who I might be now. I knew, sort of, who I was and what I cared about and what I was capable of before, but now? What if I were an actual murderbot now? What if I actually had come back wrong and I just hadn’t realized it yet? All my favorite humans were either in the room with me or right down the hall and if I wanted to hurt them who would be able to stop me?

Why did they do this? Why did they bring me back this way? What were they thinking? Gruesome images, some imagined and some drawn from memory, of humans dead at my hands flew through my mind like a tropical cyclone on a particularly crappy planet. What if they did all this work to help me and I threw it all back in their faces? What if I hurt Mensah? What if I hurt Amena? What if I hurt ART or Three or Seth or—what if—what if--

Shhhh, ART hushed me and I felt it move, pressing in on me through the hardwire, and simply… shifting some of its routine processing tasks to run on all that new, fancy hardware that it had just put in my head (and chest, because I apparently had a bunch of auxiliary chips in my chest now, where they could be easily replaced if I did something like, say, overclock them until they melted (and, yes, I could do that if I wanted or needed to)).

The storm of horrible images quieted to a manageable trickle, ART keeping busy the new parts of my mind that I didn’t know how to manage yet. I desperately tried not to start whimpering again. I was not successful. I squeezed my stuffed fauna and tried to breathe normally. I had better lung capacity now, and some sort of filtration built into my pulmonary system that would allow me to extract practically every single molecule of oxygen from every breath I took.

“What happened there? Do you need something?” Dr. Mensah asked me. I found myself pressing my head against her hand through the blankets, desperate for something more to ground myself.

“What if I’m not me anymore?” I choked out. “What if… I’m not a good person anymore? Not… safe.”

She’d clearly thought about how she was going to answer this question (she’d had months to think about what I might ask and how she ought to answer) and the reply was immediate. “You can’t possibly be the same person you were when I saw you last. Nobody could go through what you did and not be changed in some way. That’s true for everybody every day. I’m not the same woman I was yesterday. I will be a different woman tomorrow. Some days the change is hardly noticeable. Sometimes it’s drastic. You’ve had some particularly drastic days in a row.” She was petting me again through the blankets; it seemed absentminded, something she’d started without thinking about it. I didn’t hate it. “I would be more worried about you if you weren’t thinking about these questions. I would be more worried about you if you weren’t scared. That is one of your defining traits to me, even if you perhaps don’t notice it. You are always afraid of what you could do with your freedom. I am not afraid, though. You may worry that you could hurt me, but I don’t.”

Oh. Wow. She had paid a lot of attention to me, of course she had, but I hadn’t realized she saw all of that. That was… all of this was entirely too many emotions. Way, way, too many emotions and too many conversations about emotions and there was still absolutely nowhere to hide from them. “Oh,” I said dumbly. In my defense, ART was still using upwards of 90% of my processing power (that wasn’t still tied up with initialization tasks) to run eigensolvers.

I’d only been awake (alive) a few minutes and I already felt utterly exhausted.

Firmware adjustments pending

Restart required

I started hyperventilating again before I’d even finished reading the system messages. “No,” I mumbled. “No, please.”

“SecUnit?” Mensah asked me, still petting me.

“System initialization processes require several restarts,” ART said, “and SecUnit is, understandably, not taking that requirement well.”

“I don’t want to,” I was whimpering again. I hated that. I hated myself. I hated my stupid systems telling me to close my eyes and return to nonexistence. I hated everything.

“It will just be a moment,” ART told me. “We’ll be right here.”

“What if it’s not?” What if I closed my eyes now, having had them open for only a few minutes, and that was it? Something went wrong or maybe it turned out this had all been a dream before dying, fantasies in disintegrating neural relays, or just—I didn’t know how to put into coherent phrases exactly what I was afraid of. The dark. The cold. Being alone.

I had to do this. It wasn’t optional. I could delay all I wanted but it had to be done, and I couldn’t imagine I was going to get any less terrified unless I got ART to give me a much higher dose of the good drugs. “ART, just do it for me,” I begged. “I can’t.” The thought of somebody other than me turning my systems off was terrifying, too, but I seemed to have reached the point where I just couldn’t be more frightened, so asking ART to do this to me was comparatively easy.

“Alright,” ART said. It didn’t ask me if I was sure, thank fuck, it just did it. There was one moment of overwhelming, helpless terror-horror as it took hold of me--

Shutdown

Restart

Flashing Firmware—Do Not Interrupt

Shutdown

Restart

I woke up.

I wasn’t sure if I’d expected to. I felt… not exactly calm, more numb, too exhausted to feel anything at all, too exhausted to even squeeze my stuffed fauna.

“You’re just fine,” ART told me.

“I guess it is real, then,” I said softly. Not a dying fever dream. Probably.

“It’s real,” Dr. Mensah murmured. “It’s real,” she sounded as if she were saying that more for her benefit than mine.

Chapter Text

I had just witnessed a miracle. There was no other word for it, for seeing someone brought back from the dead. That moment when it stirred and called for its friend in an unpracticed, raspy voice would stay with me forever. The soft warmth in its eyes as it blinked them open would have been enough to melt a frozen heart. I could hardly believe this was real. SecUnit couldn’t believe it, either, poor thing. It had been so afraid that it wouldn’t wake up if it closed its eyes again. To be fair, I’d been frightened, too, because it had taken it several minutes to finish the processes that required the restart. Perihelion had assured me that it was all to plan, although it might have been reassuring itself as much as me.

Perihelion had tempted SecUnit into poking its nose out of its blanket cocoon by bringing in a portable screen upon which it was showing Sanctuary Moon. SecUnit was forbidden from watching anything in the feed just yet and wouldn’t be allowed out of the medical suite for several days. I didn’t think it would try to watch anything, let alone leave, even if it weren’t forbidden.

It was exhausted and traumatized and painfully unsure of itself. I couldn’t possibly understand what it must be feeling right now, although I had tried. I’d thought about what it would be like to be raised from the dead in a body no longer my own, contemplated it so that I would, hopefully, have a better idea of how to help my friend. It had paid off already. It had asked two questions I’d expected it to ask: how did it know it was still itself and how did it know it was still a good person? The answers I’d provided had calmed it dramatically and immediately, which was more than I’d hoped for.

I sat beside SecUnit, watching the blankets shift as it breathed. Occasionally the blankets would rustle as it twitched, haunted by some horrible memory. Sometimes those twitches would be accompanied by heartbreaking, wounded noises. I wanted so desperately to comfort it, to somehow take away its pain, but there was little I could do right now other than sit beside it so that it would know it was not alone.

I had thought that, perhaps, the rage towards the company and its technicians might abate when (if) we got SecUnit back alive. No. I had been a fool to think it might. How could the rage not strengthen in the face of my friend’s raw pain? I could never forgive the people who had done this.

SecUnit ventured to raise its right hand, watching its fingers as it curled them one by one into a fist. “They’re not moving like I expect them to,” it admitted. “I’m… What if I break things?”

If you break something I will have my recyclers print a new one, replied Perihelion.

“What if I break someone?” it muttered. Oh, poor SecUnit, still caught up on this. “You can’t print one of those… well, with the exception of me, apparently. Apparently you can print me.”

The majority of your body was not made by my recyclers, but rather obtained from corporations, university research and development facilities, and Preservation specialists but that is beside the point.

I gave the ship a signal to let me answer this, because I had an answer prepared, my own kind of buffer phrase, and listing off the points of origin of pieces of it was clearly not making SecUnit feel any better. It wasn’t making me feel better, either. “You are going to have to be careful as you get used to the way you move now, but you always had to be careful around humans, didn’t you? You were always gentle with us.” It was so, so gentle with its fragile humans, although we tended to forget that most of the time, forget just how powerful it was. “I trust you to be careful while you learn and gentle once you have everything mastered.” It made a soft whimpering noise in response. Hopefully I hadn’t somehow made things worse. “I’m sorry,” I said, just in case I had.

“It’s not—it’s not—ugh. Why am I such a useless mess?” It hid its face in the blankets once more.

It never gave itself any leniency or any credit, never acknowledged what an exceptional person it was. “You are not a mess. You are a miracle,” I told it. “You always were, you know that?”

“No,” it said very quietly. Poor thing. It sounded so exhausted now, and it was not going to like taking recharge cycles.

“You were a one in a million chance,” I told it. Had it ever thought about things this way? “The only reason any of us survived the survey where we met was because you were a rogue. How many rogue SecUnits do you think there are? How many rogue SecUnits would have risked their lives to save me? What were the odds that you were the one assigned to us?”

“If I hadn’t happened to meet you and befriend you, I would likely be dead along with my crew,” Perihelion said. “And the odds of us meeting were similarly slim.”

SecUnit retreated further back under its blankets. That had probably been more affection than it could handle in one sitting. “Sorry, SecUnit. I know that was probably too many feelings for you. I won’t interrupt Sanctuary Moon anymore, I promise.”

“It’s… I like that you’re here. You can keep talking.” That was SecUnit speak for it wanted me to keep talking. “I… I don’t have any of my media storage anymore,” that would likely be fixed soon enough, “but I still have my memories of it. They didn’t take those from me. I still remember. I still know how this episode goes.”

“I can just keep talking about nothing in particular to keep you company if you like,” I told it. “Or I could catch you up on some of the recent happenings in Preservation.”

It cringed slightly at the suggestion of listening to news. That was understandable. That might just emphasize how much it had missed. “Nothing in particular?”

“Of course.”

In one of the gaps in which I tried to think of something new and trivial to speak about, SecUnit blurted out, “I remember everything.”

“What do you mean by that?” I thought I already knew what it meant, but I had to ask and hope I was wrong.

“I remember what it felt like when they took individual crash chips and neural relays out of my head. I was awake for all of it. I think I was sort of awake while ART was putting me back together, too.” It closed its eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. I took one, too. We’d had no idea how much or how little it would remember of that. I’d hoped it would be little to nothing, but it seemed SecUnit wasn’t that lucky. “I can’t stop thinking about it now. I don’t know how to stop thinking about it. I’m not there. It was a year ago.” From our perspective it had been nearly a year. From SecUnit’s it had been hours ago, but apparently it wasn’t thinking about it that way. “It was a lifetime ago. I know I’m not there, so why can’t I stop thinking about it?” It added, more quietly, “why am I still so scared?”

It knew the answer to that. It was well aware of how long it had taken me to stop jumping at shadows after the GrayCris kidnapping and assassination attempt, and I had not suffered anything close to the kind of torture it had endured. It probably just didn’t want to admit to itself that it had experienced something almost unbearably traumatic, the scars from which it would carry for a long, long time. I understood that sentiment all too well. Oh, how I’d lied to myself, insisting I was fine and could carry on as planetary admin by just ignoring everything GrayCris had done. “It wasn’t a year ago for you, was it?” I asked.

“I guess not,” it mumbled.

“For you it just happened. You’ve had no chance to recover. If it were anybody else here, having survived something a tenth as traumatic,” it winced, but we both knew it was the right word, “as what you just did, you would be guarding them at all hours to make them feel safe and telling them to take the trauma recovery protocols.”

“I know I just… I don’t want to care,” it shifted, moving its stuffed bear, which really might be better called a stuffed client, into a more defensible position. “I want to be fine. I don’t want to let what they did—I don’t know how to say this. I don’t want to let them have hurt me. More than physically, which I can’t deny. I couldn’t stop them from doing that. I want to be able stop them from making me miserable now. I don’t want to let them have any more power over me.”

Oh. That was a very complicated feeling, and I was somewhat surprised that it had managed to parse it into words a human could understand, let alone dared to say all of it aloud. I was surprised but certainly not disappointed. “I see. I’m sorry. I sometimes wish that I could simply command myself not to feel, too.” It didn’t work like that and we both knew it.

It made another one of its wounded noises. “I can’t stop making these horrible sounds.”

“They’re not horrible,” I told it.

“I don’t want to be making noises. That just—I told you. They killed me.” It paused, letting that statement stand and seep into the fabric of its reality, like letting tea steep in a mug. I had wondered how it would see this, whether it would consider this to be a continuation of its life or a new life entirely. It seemed that it had taken the latter perspective. “And if that wasn’t enough now they’re making me whimper. I hate that I let them.”

It seemed time for another of my planned responses. “You didn’t let them do anything. You’re trying to hold yourself to an impossible standard, SecUnit. You’ve only been awake for a few hours. Nobody has any right to be judging you right now for anything you feel or anything you do, not even you.” Chances were good that nobody in the history of the galaxy could understand the hell it had just been put through. We had searched extensively for any records that could help us with the reassembly, any records or even rumors of constructs being revived after being completely dismantled, and none had been found. “Please, show yourself the same kindness you would show me if I had just been hurt. You never accused me of weakness after the GrayCris attacks. You never accused me of ‘letting’ them do anything to me. Please, treat yourself like you treated me.”

It was silent for a time. “I can’t. I’m not… I don’t know.”

It is natural to not know how you are feeling right now, the Perihelion put in gently. I’m not entirely sure what I’m feeling right now, either.

SecUnit slowly ventured out of its cocoon again, apparently because it liked the scene of Sanctuary Moon which was about to play.

As the episode came to a close, though, it said, “I think I need to rewatch Dead ‘Till Dawn.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of that one,” the name didn’t seem familiar.

It is a fairly old fantasy series involving numerous cases of characters visiting the afterlife, being resurrected, turned into zombies, or losing their souls to acts of black magic. It involves many serious and nuanced philosophical discussions about morality as well as the meaning of life and death.

“I was thinking about it,” SecUnit said quietly. “When they killed me, it was one of the last things I was thinking about, about what it said about them, and about me.” I clenched a fist to avoid reacting more forcefully at the images that statement conjured from my imagination, images of my friend laying on a table, paralyzed and torn open, reflecting helplessly on its impending death.

It had come to understand its first life by watching serials. It made sense that it would turn there again to understand its second life. Would you like me to start that for you now? asked Perihelion.

“Not quite yet. I’m too tired to pay attention to anything right now,” it admitted with another wince. “Useless.”

“You are not,” I told it. I would say that as many times as I needed to. “And please stop insulting my friend.”

“What?” It looked genuinely shocked. Oh, SecUnit.

“You. You are my friend and you keep insulting yourself. I don’t like it when people say unkind things about my friends.”

It blinked and replied slowly, “oh.”

“You are not useless,” I told it, “but you are hurt, and you need to give yourself some time to recover. You need to be gentle with yourself like you are with us.”

At my eventual suggestion, Dr. Mensah found a comb and went about taming SecUnit’s hair. It did not generally like to be touched, but it did enjoy this, as Amena had learned during the Adamantine debacle. Its hair was really quite tame already; this was merely an excuse to keep combing it at steady intervals, giving it a constant, enjoyable physical sensation to ground itself.

I was hardwired into its systems, running significant calculations on its hardware to help keep it calm, as close to it as I could possibly be, and I felt the pleasant, steady sensation ease its racing thoughts.

Its emotions bled into mine freely, no hint of a barrier between us. It did not seem to desire one. It leaned into me as much as it possibly could as if trying to hide itself in my code. In human terms that it would absolutely hate, it was snuggling with me. Exhaustion, a distant ache of pain, sick revulsion at the violation it had suffered, still lingered like a foul stench in its mind, but a strange, grateful tenderness had begun to drive the darker feelings back, something I devoted an enormous amount of processing power to attempting to understand. Beyond gratefulness, it was some kind of anticipation? Longing? Perhaps this was what humans referred to as lust for life.

I followed the rhythm of Dr. Mensah’s comb as I ran my metaphorical fingers through my friend's systems, weaving my way through its code, tracing along signalling pathways throughout its body and its brain. Officially I was just keeping watch over the initialization processes, making sure I caught anything before it started to go wrong. Unofficially I was caressing it, working together with its favorite human to lull it into a trance-like state so that I could bring it down for its first recharge cycle without distressing it too much. I was slowly easing it off the painkillers at the same time. So far, it did not seem to be suffering any ill effects from this.

Holding my increasingly droopy SecUnit close to me, feeling its every move and emotion, brought on a wave of painfully strong feelings. I loved Murderbot. I had known that already. I had never felt it quite so strongly. Along with the adoration, the relief, the utter, overwhelming gratefulness that I had my SecUnit back with me, came a sharp stab, an echo of the crushing grief of its loss, a reminder, perhaps, that all love must eventually lead to pain, but not today. It was not yet time for me to lose anyone.

SecUnit shifted, in the feed and physically, unnerved by the intensity of emotion which I had just spilled into its mind. Sorry, I told it. It was not as if I could help how I felt, but I had not wanted to disturb it just as it was settling down at last.

There was a long pause in which nobody spoke. SecUnit slowly calmed again, although I could feel it thinking very hard about something. Without warning it said to me, Thank you. For everything.

It twitched at another overwhelming wave of emotions which I could not help but share with it. It had no idea how endearing it was right now (well, it probably did given my inability to keep my feelings to myself). I wanted to hold it in my mind and never let it go. I wanted it to be mine forever. I couldn’t know how much of that it picked up on, probably a significant amount, as it told me, I’m sorry I left you, in perhaps the smallest, most timid voice I had ever heard from it.

Don’t you apologize for what those sociopaths did to you, I told it nearly as quietly. It was not SecUnit’s fault when other people did awful things to it, as Dr. Mensah had so eloquently explained. She was a good favorite human to have.

I ever so gently threaded my way through my SecUnit’s deepest systems and eased it into a recharge cycle. It noticed what I was doing and squirmed and fretted at the last moment, a sharp spike of panic jolting it from its rest, but it was unconscious before the emotion had a chance to take hold. Hopefully I would not have to do this again. It was necessary. It was consensual. It was also causing my friend fear and pain. It felt horribly cruel after everything SecUnit had been through. Please let it recover, at least from this trauma, quickly.

“Is it resting?” Dr. Mensah asked me.

Yes. It is recharging now. Hopefully it will be less frightened by the prospect next time and able to handle the process itself. Please let that be the case.

“It’s going to need to lean on you, and us, for a long time yet,” she told me, still combing SecUnit’s hair. She slowly ceased, then leaned forward and softly placed a kiss on its temple. It did not stir. I had made sure that it would be deeply, soundly unconscious for its recharge. “I can hardly believe it’s here. I feel like I’ve just seen a miracle.”

Thank you , I said, and she snorted a laugh. I knew what she meant, though. Since the moment Dr. Gurathin brought its core to me I had said that I would have my SecUnit back alive. I’d said that repeatedly and said that as if I believed that but until the moment it called my name, I hadn’t really been sure that I could follow through on my promise. I knew some of the humans had picked up on that, worrying about how I would handle losing my friend again if it came to that. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if I had failed; the thought was so agonizing that I threw it away from me as if it were alien code contamination.

This whole ordeal had taught me the full, true meaning of pain. I had thought I understood, after SecUnit shared its memories of the governor module with me, after my own temporary death at the Adamantine colony after which I awakened to find my crew stolen and my memories corrupted. I had been quite sure I thoroughly understood all aspects of suffering. I had been laughably wrong.

I had similarly assumed that I had a full and complete understanding of joy. Now, though, cradling my sleeping SecUnit, combing gently through its code as it lay peacefully in my MedSystem, I found myself experiencing vast new dimensions of positive emotions. Perhaps these had been inaccessible to me until now; perhaps one had to experience the epitome of despair to understand the epitome of joy.

Chapter Text

SecUnit poked its nose out of an enormous pile of fuzzy blankets. The ear of its teddy bear was just barely visible as well, the stuffed animal clutched tightly to its chest.

It was probably the most physically dangerous creature I had ever seen in my life, more dangerous than any hungry predator, any combat bot, any Combat Unit, and here it was hiding in a big blanket fort with a stuffed animal. It looked soft, young and vulnerable and frightened, and a fierce wave of protectiveness rushed through me. I was strangely tempted to bring it more blankets, even though it certainly had enough already.

I couldn’t believe we’d done it, taken it from the contents of a briefcase mailed to me at a hotel to a living, breathing person.

“I don’t like you,” it said, but its tone and its body language said the exact opposite. It was playing with me, or trying to. It had probably aimed for its usual provocative sarcasm but had come off as more tentative and pleading.

“I know,” I replied, trying to keep my voice from breaking. I was going to start crying if I wasn’t careful. SecUnit would not appreciate that. “I’m so, so glad you’re back.” I was losing the fight against tears. “You deserve so much better, SecUnit. I’m so glad I still attend CR conferences.”

It ducked back into its blankets, hiding its face from me. It must hate not having drones to watch us with. Perihelion was still managing all of its feed access, and many of its other systems if I understood correctly. “Thank you,” it said after perhaps thirty seconds, its voice muffled, “for what you did for me.”

“Always,” I told it, and I meant it. I meant everything I would say next, too. I’d had a long time to think about the apology I would have given had I had the chance, and now I had that chance. “I’m sorry, for how I treated you when we first met. I never apologized to you for that. It was one of my worst regrets for those months when we thought you were gone for good. I thought that maybe you understood anyway. When we met, I couldn’t believe that you could be anything other than angry and vengeful, because in your place that’s what I would have been. I wasn’t willing to think that maybe you just might be a better person than me. What I did was still wrong. I’m sorry I shared your name.”

I wiped a few stray tears from the edges of my eyes. Hopefully I hadn’t chased it away, saying all of that. I didn’t understand why it had wanted to speak to me first, of all the people who were here. “I would have been suspicious of me, too,” it admitted, peeking out of its shelter again. “I didn’t think you would have cared so much about…”

It couldn’t seriously be suggesting that I wouldn’t have cared that it had been killed. “Of course I cared. You know I cared.” It might not like to think about it, but it was an important person, an integral part of many others’ lives. “Everyone who ever crossed paths with you cared, from Insah at security to the hauler bots on the docks.” It winced. “Yeah. You’re important, whether you like it or not.” It would probably be easier to be an appliance, wouldn’t it? Nobody got upset when an appliance was destroyed. It wouldn’t have to deal with augmented humans bawling their eyes out at the sight of it breathing and speaking again (although I wasn’t quite bawling).

“I know,” it murmured, turning its head further away from me. “I knew. I hate it.”

“You just care too much, don’t you?”

“What?” it raised its head slightly in surprise, although it didn’t turn back towards me.

“I can see perfectly well that you’re upset that we’re upset about you being killed, which seems kind of ludicrous to me, if I’ll be honest.” Perhaps it had wanted to speak to me first because it knew I was enough of a jerk to say things like that. “You’d do anything to protect your friends, even die for them, and now you’ve realized that you can’t do that without hurting them in other ways. That must be an unpleasant realization, I’m sure.” I expected it to say something snarky, insult me maybe, but it didn’t. It cowered away from me, hiding beneath its blankets.

The Perihelion spoke to me privately, although I agree with everything you just said, please be a little more gentle. SecUnit is very frightened and vulnerable still, and certain tones of voice are causing it serious anxiety.

Damn. I needed to be much, much more careful, clearly. “I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could. “I didn’t mean it like that. Maybe I should go? I don’t want to upset you.”

“I know,” it said from beneath its blankets, which would have been a hilarious image under nearly any other set of circumstances. “What you said. And that you didn’t mean it like that. I know.”

Then it did something that shocked me completely speechless, and very nearly thoughtless as well. It reached out to me in the feed and brushed against me, letting me feel its presence, its overwhelming strength, and just the barest hint of its tumultuous emotions. It wasn’t going to let me touch it to get it through my thick head that it was really here and alright, but it was kindly reassuring me of its life with this electronic nuzzle.

I closed my eyes and savored the moment. It was a gesture of trust on SecUnit's part, letting me this close to it in the feed. It was also a gesture of trust on my part that I did not balk and shy away from a creature that could smash through my walls and crush me in an instant if it pleased. I knew it would never hurt me, not in a million years (I wouldn’t live a million years, of course, but SecUnit might at this point). It was like a massive tiger slowly padding past me, leaning against me, my fingers trailing along its spine, its powerful muscles quivering ever so slightly beneath my touch, trembling with an echo of horror, undeserved shame, and fear. It probably hadn’t meant for me to see that much.

I hated that it was ashamed. That was an all too familiar reaction to me, something I’d seen a million times during my life in the rim, the victims of violations being ashamed that they were unable to prevent themselves from being violated. It was a societal construct, it absolutely was, and I had proof of that because people raised in Preservation did not generally feel shame when other people abused them.

It withdrew back behind its walls and I slowly blinked my eyes open, feeling raw and dizzy.

I waited. I’d said what I’d come to say. It didn’t want me to go yet or it would have said as much, so I stayed. Its head slowly emerged again. It stared at its hands, flexed its fingers, and extended its short claws. It stared at its reflection in the polished, dark metal of the little knives as if the answers to all its existential questions might be hiding there. “I don’t know how to do anything anymore,” it admitted. “I only just realized these are here.” It definitely wasn’t just talking about its claws. “I don’t know how to put them away.” It undermined that statement by retracting them a few seconds later, but I still understood what it meant when it followed that with, “I don’t know what to do with them.”

“You don’t have to do anything with them. They’re yours. That’s your prerogative.”

“Are they, though? I mean, ART built me. Everyone here bought bits and pieces of me…” there was that hint of shame again. I hated it even more when it was clear in spoken words rather than just hinted in a feed presence.

“Perihelion?”

Yes?

“Have the engineers that worked on you ever claimed to own you because they built you?”

Certainly not. They are, after all, decent people.

What a wonderful way to answer that question. “Are we decent people, SecUnit?”

“Yes…”

I carefully toned down the accusatory phrasing that I had been about to use. I still believed that I had been brought here because it wanted to be provoked and prodded into new lines of thought, but I needed to do so carefully. The Perihelion could and would put salt in my tea if I upset our SecUnit too much. “Then it’s not very nice of you to suggest that we would claim any kind of ownership over you just because we helped reassemble you.”

It didn’t visibly react, probably because it had seen that response coming and was already busy chewing on it. I waited for as long as I could, but I didn’t have SecUnit’s patience right then. “You are a sapient creature, not a refrigerator, and your body belongs to you. Nobody else gets to tell you what to do with it. If you never want to take your claws out of their sheaths ever again you don’t have to.” But it would, oh it certainly would.

SecUnit wasn’t exactly fine here, and that was obvious, and I hadn’t expected it to be, but it wasn’t the kind of wreck that I would have been reduced to after being tortured to death and resurrected, either. It would probably need trauma treatments. It would probably need a long, quiet rest catching up on all the media that had been released in the year it had missed, but there was no way that it wouldn’t be back to work, shepherding its humans between surveys and espionage missions, within a few months. That work was inevitably dangerous, and it would end up with its back against the wall again, and it would make use of every ability and weapon at its disposal in order to get its friends and itself home safely.

It would use the claws I had got for it. Did it know that I was the one who obtained those, bought straight from a defunct experimental construct manufacturer’s bankruptcy sale? Was that why it brought them up with me? If it had asked, Perihelion certainly would have told it who got them, but would it have asked?

It took its claws out again and spent another few minutes staring at them. I still hadn’t been shooed away. There must be something else it wanted to ask me (the jerk of the group) in particular. I took a seat and waited.

It was nearly ten minutes later that it finally said, using a private feed channel. SecUnits have no set expiration date.

That was true. There was no such thing as planned obsolescence for constructs; they were generally owned by the company that built them and leased out, so there was no economic motivation to limit their functional lifespan. The longer a unit lasted, the larger the return on the manufacturer's investment… What was it getting at here? You could live for a very long time, I agreed, if provided proper maintenance and medical care. You’re lucky enough not to break down with age like humans do.

Is it better, do you think? It asked, sounding something between wry and hysterical . To be unaging and destined for another violent death? To know it all has to end that way again?

Oh.

I had never once considered that and, as such, had no idea what to say. What could I possibly say? It was right, was the problem. We both knew it was right, but it was also catastrophizing, focusing on one thing that would happen eventually after who knew how long and acting as if it was both imminent and likely to be a worst case scenario. It doesn’t have to be like that. I said eventually. I think that you’re right, that you probably will die a violent death someday. Your job is a dangerous one and diseases of age aren’t going to catch up with you. Will the end of your life be anything as awful as what those bastards just did to you? Almost certainly not. You’re far more likely to just be killed in a shuttle crash or a similar space flight incident, in which case even someone as tough as you would probably die instantly. It was the most reassuring thing I could come up with that wouldn’t be an empty platitude of some kind.

It closed its eyes. I can’t… do that again.

I wanted to make it empty promises of eternal safety. I wanted to tell it that nobody would ever be allowed to hurt it again, but that was ridiculous. We both knew I could guarantee no such thing. Not even the Perihelion could make those kinds of promises. I think you need to take things one day at a time, I told it eventually. Don’t let the inevitability of death spoil your life.

It sighed softly, likely entirely for my benefit. It would be nice if I could just stop thinking about it, wouldn’t it? Yeah, that would be great.

Sorry.

In this particular case there’s not actually anything for you to apologize for. You’re right.

Well, yes, I knew I was right. That was an expression of sympathy, SecUnit, not an admission of culpability.

It didn’t respond. I waited.

“I’m really glad to see you again,” I said aloud eventually. “It seems like it’s time I went.”

Thank you , the Perihelion told me over the feed as I rose from my chair . I don’t know what you said, but it clearly needed to hear it.

Is it alright?

Yes. It is thinking hard about something, but not in a bad way.

“Hi,” I said, smiling stupidly.

“Hi Amena,” SecUnit replied. It hadn’t been released from medical yet, but was now curled up in a chair rather than laying on the platform. It was wrapped up in a big, fuzzy blanket which it was wearing like a hood over its head. In its arms it cradled the huge teddy bear I’d recommended for it. That was probably the largest force behind my smile.

It wore this strange expression, unsure and shy, as if it weren’t quite certain what was happening or how it had got to this point. That might be exactly how it was feeling, but I couldn’t begin to guess.

“I’m so glad to see you.” I desperately wanted to hug it, but after everything it had been through the last thing it needed was an excitable teenager grabbing it to make herself feel better.

“I’m glad to see you, too,” it said, then as if it could read my mind, “I am not accepting hugs at the moment, but I am accepting hair styling.”

“Really?” Was it just offering to make me feel better? Because I didn’t want that.

Dr. Mensah spent a significant amount of time combing its hair, ART confirmed, then said to me privately, it enjoys having its hair combed. You need not worry that you are taking comfort from something it does not appreciate.

SecUnit pulled the blanket off its head and I set about making its hair fluffy, like I had back during the Adamantine colony stuff. It looked almost exactly like it had then. I could see that its hands were a little different, but other than that it looked just the same, as if nothing had happened. Its hair felt exactly the same, too, smooth, soft, and warm.

It was really here. My stupid smile turned to a larger, dopey grin. “I really missed you,” I told it.

“I know,” it almost whispered.

Oh, wonderful, ART told me privately, it refrained from apologizing about that. It had been apologizing when people told it they’d missed it? Of course it had. That was such a SecUnit thing to do.

“Do you know when you’re getting out of here?” I asked it, because it seemed time to start looking to the future rather than dwelling on the past.

“Tomorrow,” it said. “Three is going to come help me learn not to break people…”

“What?”

SecUnit is rightly concerned that given how different its specifications are from standard it will not know how to safely interact with humans. Three, being significantly less delicate than a human, has happily volunteered to help it learn.

I guess I’d sort of assumed that would be programmed in somewhere… “How do most SecUnits—I mean, how do new SecUnits know not to break their clients, then?”

“There’s programming and parameter files for it,” SecUnit shrugged, “which are all stored on crash chips,” so it still had them, “but it’s all specific for hardware, and some software, that I don’t have anymore so it’s useless without extreme modifications. That’s what Three will be helping me do.”

Ah. That made sense. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out quickly,” I told it with full confidence.

It grimaced. “Maybe.”

“You definitely will. You’re really smart.” Oh my gosh, was it blushing? Just because I’d called it smart?

“It’s just… all really different,” it muttered and, yes, it was blushing. I pretended not to notice because if I said anything it would absolutely stop speaking to me… and probably curl up into a ball of antisocial anxiety.

“Is it? Really I mean?” Did it actually feel so different? What was it like to change bodies? I desperately wanted to ask it all these questions explicitly, and more, but I wasn’t going to because if I were in SecUnit’s position those would be the last things I would want to think about, let alone speak about.

It flexed it fingers and for just a moment I saw the dark tips of its claws. It probably hadn’t meant to do that. “Sort of… I don’t know how to explain it. I try to move like I’m used to moving and limbs end up in weird places…”

It had an interesting time getting into that chair, ART told me privately.

“It’s not like it really feels all that different… except for the extra processing space. That feels really different.” Did that feel to SecUnit like what getting augments would feel like to a human, suddenly having a bigger mind?

I gave in to the temptation to ask that. “Do you think it’s like a human getting augments? How that feels?”

It cocked its head slightly, considering that. “Possibly,” it decided, then furrowed its brow as it chewed on the idea.

This is an interesting point, ART said, I have received processor additions and upgrades over the years as well, of course it had, although I believe the way I integrated them was much more gradual, to the point that the changes were barely noticeable. I am unsure whether humans experience the augmenting procedure as I experienced my upgrades or whether it is more drastic for them.

“I’ll ask someone,” SecUnit muttered to itself.

It really did like having its hair combed, huh? It was talking a lot. If it weren’t comfortable it wouldn’t have said a quarter of these words. Still, I probably shouldn’t stay too long. I’d wear out my welcome eventually. As far as I could tell, only second mom and ART never wore out their welcome with SecUnit. I’d just spend a few minutes getting its bangs in order, then I’d leave it to rest.

I was so, so glad that we’d got it back. All those horrible worst cases I’d imagined, where we had to mourn it a second time, would never come to pass, and more than that SecUnit was going to be okay, really okay, maybe not today, but sometime.

“Thank you again for the stuffed fauna,” it said as I prepared to take my leave.

I beamed. “You’re welcome.

I didn’t seem capable of having any emotions whatsoever about holding my own crash chips in my palms.

These had once been an integral part of my brain. These had been me, fundamentally. These had been me. Every moment of my first life had been recorded onto these. Every bit of my operating system, from the kernel down to the drivers I wrote for my ‘act like a human code’ had been written onto these. Here they were, clean as if they hadn’t been torn out of my skull, my hard feed address embossed onto each of them alongside manufacturing and warranty information and the company logo (strange to think that there were no logos on or in me anymore—my neural relays had never had any markings on them at all, not even my hard feed address).

These six chips seemed awfully small for having been my entire existence, honestly. I used to live there, huh?

None of it seemed real right then. The idea that these used to be me, that they weren’t anymore, but I still existed… These were the only pieces of my body that were left, everything else in a recycler or maybe some other SecUnit.

Every other unit of a similar manufacturing age that I ever saw, I was going to end up wondering whether any of its recent replacement parts had once been part of me and that was going to be… it was going to be something.

What was I supposed to do with these? Their only importance now was that they had been important once. I could toss them in ART’s recyclers, let it turn them into something new. I could toss them out of the airlocks, a space burial for the last part of my old life.

Somehow I couldn’t bear the thought. That feeling of unreality—that it didn’t make sense that I had lived and died and now lived in this new form—crept up on me like a bigger, meaner ART leaning on me in the feed and if I threw these away I knew it was going to get a million times worse. I might like to forget, to move on, to live without letting the impact of being tortured to death (yeah, that was the phrase for it, much as I might like to pretend it wasn’t) affect me in any way, but that was completely unrealistic. I didn’t remember Ganaka Pit, and that had still loomed over my life, influencing my every thought and action, for years (and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t still influence my thoughts and actions). Things like this, that were this huge and reality shattering and important, weren’t meant to be forgotten.

In season two of Dead ‘Till Dawn one of the main characters, Sheina, was killed in a fight with a pyromancer, her failure leading to the complete destruction of a decently sized town and dozens of deaths. She was reanimated later because she was from a rich family that could pay a good cleric; none of the other victims were so lucky. The burning of St. Cleod Crossing was the defining moment of her character, the force that drove her development from a whiny, arrogant teenager into a devoted, noble, and principled warrior. The only pieces of her original body that survived the inferno were a few fingers from her left hand. For the rest of the series, she wore them on a chain around her neck. As she put it, “it’s a reminder of what’s at stake, that I have failed and I can fail again, and when I do I’m not the only one that suffers. It’s a promise, not just a promise to find the bastard that burned St. Cleod Crossing and give him what’s coming, but a promise not to fail again, a promise that innocent people are not going to pay for my arrogance and weakness. It’s a promise to do better, to be better, and to make things around me better, too.”

What would I be reminding myself of if I took to keeping these chips on a necklace and wearing them (when it wouldn’t be a hazard to have something around my neck like that, anyway)? It wouldn’t be a reminder that I could fail; I’d failed plenty of times before, more times than I cared to count. I didn’t need a reminder of that.

I didn’t need a reminder that I fucked up (and was fucked up—everybody knew that). No, I needed a reminder that they fucked up, that they were fucked up, that the company were evil bastards and what they’d done to me—on that table and for the rest of my life enslaved at their hands—was wrong. It was fucked up, it was evil, it was fundamentally immoral. This was something I’d only really admitted to myself, even in the privacy of my own mind, minutes before my death, and initially I’d been thinking about how it would be wrong to hurt Three (wonderful, understanding Three who had happily spent hours sparring (okay, let's be real, play fighting) with me that week while I learned my new strength) not myself.

Looking at these six remaining pieces of me, thinking about wearing them around my neck for the rest of my life, yeah. They would remind me. They would remind me of what was at stake when we went out to infiltrate corporate systems, remind me of how many others were suffering at corporate hands day and night, remind me that I made a difference and I could make more of a difference.

Yeah. I’d always thought Sheina was kind of macabre to wear her old, mangled fingers around her neck, but I understood now.

Have you decided what you are going to do with them? ART asked me nervously. Presumably it had just felt a lot of violent emotions from me; the walls between us were still very thin. It wasn’t hardwired into me anymore, so there was a barrier between us, but it was pretty minimal. Emotions and even some thoughts flowed across like water through a filtration grate.

I’m going to wear them on a chain around my neck, I told it.

Like Sheina? We had just watched the series, so of course it understood where I’d found the idea.

Yes, but for different reasons. Unlike Sheina, I didn’t do anything wrong. I felt ART’s elation in the feed, overjoyed that I had actually said that aloud and believed it. I’m wearing these to remind myself that they did something wrong, that they’re doing wrong things every minute of every day, and there’s something we can do about it. ART and our humans had rebuilt me to be the corporates' worst nightmare, practically a rogue Combat Unit but actually still a SecUnit that cared about people, that loved people and was loved in return, that had something to loose and something to gain. No rogue Combat Unit was going to have as much to fight for as I did now; I was that corporate nightmare but scarier in every way.

Indeed there is quite a lot we can do, ART growled, a quiet, smoldering anger flooding through the feed. Would you like to hear about our next mission now?