Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Chapter Text

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There’s this common misconception I’ve seen about constructs and shutdowns on the entertainment feeds.

In most serials that include constructs, they show shutdowns as some sort of highly-detailed, isolated mind palace. Libraries are a common aesthetic, even though no construct I know has ever been inside a library, but some shows choose locations that are probably supposed to be more symbolic, like towering cities that are eerily void of life.

The constructs in those serials tend to use their timeout in the shutdown zone to lament the circumstances of their existence, waxing poetic about what it means to be alive or about their desires to be welcomed by human society, to be viewed as human, to be human. They negotiate with themselves over which pieces they would be willing to carve away in order to make that happen, and—ugh.

It’s all complete crap. That’s not what a shutdown is like. It’s not bookcases as a simulacrum of internal file structures, or a barren city as an allegory for a construct’s futile attempts at copying humanity.

Wait. Do I mean allegory? Or is that a metaphor?

Whatever, I don’t know; I’ve never been in a library.

The point is that that’s not what a shutdown is. A shutdown is closer to a void. It’s cold, and black, and empty.

But for all of that, it’s not completely isolated, either, because shutdowns are the halting of inorganic systems, and inorganic systems only. They can’t touch organic systems.

A construct’s organics remain aware throughout a shutdown, at least partially. Sensation is muted, but we still feel something, some suggestion of pressure or temperature or movement. Constructs generally can’t parse much data from that—not with our processors offline like that, and everybody knows that constructs can’t operate with just their organic systems—but we can tell the broad strokes when something is happening.

If comparisons are drawn between construct stasis and human sleep, then complete shutdown is our version of a nightmare. A form of sleep paralysis, tailored just for us.

All of this is to say that after I was tripped into an automatic shutdown, I wasn’t completely unaware. My inorganics were offline and struggling through a reboot—talking my internal systems out of filing a complaint about my offline governor module was always a chore—and my organics were waiting for everything else to catch up.

Pressure, on my spine and on my neck. Temperature, lines of heat trickling from my nose to my chin. Movement, an awful and swooping rush.

There wasn’t exactly anything I could do about it.

The reboot finished, but when my systems came back online they did so desynced and disjointed. My missing senses reasserted themselves without the benefit of my processors to help sort any of the inputs. Taste was first—blood and fluid was pooling in my mouth, gross—then hearing, then sight.

My inorganic processors came online slowly after that, fumbling through what was presented to them.

I was on my feet and walking in lockstep with the SecUnit from Habitat Six, two members of GrayCris bringing up the rear. I couldn’t tell if we were escorting them, or if they were escorting us. I suppose it didn’t really matter, because either way, this whole parade compounded with the fact that I couldn’t seem to access the memory detailing why I was having to claw my way up from a forced shutdown was, objectively speaking, not a great sign.

The memory file was scrambled. Corrupted.

I tapped my systems to run a quick diagnostic, but all that it returned was a handful of messages about the minor damage that I could hazily remember had already been reported to me during my reboot cycle. All of those reports were consistent with the results of another evening of SecUnit Fight Night, and not even a particularly bad one. Nothing explained the gap in my memory.

Not good, Murderbot.

Something like that hadn’t happened since my murder spree and my consequential refurbishment. My governor module had been replaced, then, my memories almost completely scrubbed.

I ran another diagnostic, paranoia dropping my performance reliability by a full three percent. My status query directed at my governor module returned “DISABLED,” just as expected, another query confirming that the module’s logged serial number remained unchanged. My performance reliability ticked down another point anyway.

I had no answers by the time we arrived at our apparent destination, sleek metal doors whooshing open to grant us entry into one of the private offices of Habitat Four.

There were other people already in the room, evidently awaiting our arrival if the three pairs of human eyes swiveling towards us was any indication. They were amongst the shortlist of GrayCris humans that I could recognize without having to flip through the personnel files to match names to the faces.

Oktai, a xenohistorian, sat in one of the chairs against the far wall, his long legs pulled up to rest his heels on the edge of the seat. He was the one in charge of the expedition team in Habitat Three. I’m not great at estimating human ages, but his graying hair and the lines around his mouth made me think that he was probably older than most of the others. Out of everybody he was likely the closest to what I could consider my favorite, since he never suggested SecUnit fights for entertainment—although he never broke them up, either—and he treated me with the same regard as he did a habitat wall.

That is to say, he never tried to talk to me or look at me. So he was my favorite.

Oktai’s severe expression was even more severe than usual, glaring at the back of Shashi’s head.

Shashi was a botanist of some renown. At least, according to xem xe was, which xe said to anybody that stood still long enough to listen. This, unfortunately, included me. Luckily for me, xe was in charge of the expedition team stationed out of Habitat Five, which was clear across the ring of conjoined habitats from Habitat Two and therefore far enough from my gaggle of contractual obligations that I had long since learned how to avoid xem most days.

Xyr expedition team was the one that had gone out that day. Their return, and the look of exuberant joy on xyr face as xe led xyr expedition team back into the habitats, was just about the last thing that I could remember before my memory files went to shit. That look of smug satisfaction was still stretched across xyr face.

Both Oktai’s and Shashi’s SecUnits were in the room, too, standing at attention against the back wall, shoulder-to-shoulder. They stared straight ahead, their faceplates turned towards the woman at the glass and metal desk that dominated almost a full quarter of the office.

She sat behind the desk, straight-backed, her hands folded on the desktop and one leg draped over the other at the knee. Her blonde hair was pulled into such a tight bun that it pulled at the angle of her eyebrows, making her look perpetually surprised. The rest of her face, from her pale gray eyes to her thin mouth, was flat and expressionless.

I had never been able to read Valeska Kapustin, the leader of the whole GrayCris operation. I didn’t have some epiphany that let me start then, either.

I generally made a point of avoiding her as much as possible.

I felt a ping through my feed, coming from Rat’s interface. It was a short order, directing me to stand against the back wall with the other SecUnits. With so many high-profile GrayCris eyes staring me down, I didn’t think twice about complying.

The other SecUnit and I joined the others, put our backs to the wall, and stood at attention.

Rat dropped into the open chair next to Oktai. Albescu, the short geochemist in charge of the team in Habitat Six and who had been with Rat at the rear of our procession, leaned against the wall beside the door as if she was guarding it.

It was a stupid notion, since all four GrayCris SecUnits were in the room at that moment. We hadn’t all been in one room since the start of the entire mission because all four of us in one space was overkill. If anything tried to walk in that shouldn’t, it would be a smear on the ground before the doors could even finish opening. Albescu was more likely to be caught in the crossfire than to be of any help.

There was something that bothered me about the fact that all of the Company murder machines were packed into one room at once—breaks from routines make me twitchy—but Kapustin spoke before I could follow that train of thought to the end of the line.

“It’s done?” she asked. Her eyes were focused on me—that made me even more twitchy—but the words weren’t directed at me.

“Of course,” Rat said. “Order the stupid things to not move, and they won’t. Had Six there install the module, easy as pie.”

Install the what now?

“Good,” Kapustin said, dipping her chin in a brisk nod. “Then we may proceed.”

“And we’re sure this is a good idea?” Albescu asked. She was staring at the ground by her feet, her brow furrowed. “Because if we do this—”

“A little late to protest,” Rat said. “This is what we came to do.”

“No we didn’t,” Albescu snapped. “Not this. Not specifically."

Okay, I was definitely missing something, a big something. As an argument brewed, I shifted half my focus to reaching out to SecSystem, hoping that whatever recordings it or the other SecUnits had captured would offer some clarity if I just sifted through it really quick—

—and I hit a wall.

Behind my faceplate, I blinked in shock. I immediately tried again, sending another handshake request, trying to connect, but SecSystem never responded with its own half of the connection. It wasn’t gone, because I could still ping it and get a response, but anything more complicated than a simple “STATUS?”/”ONLINE” felt like the feed equivalent of ramming my head into something solid.

SecUnits were a part of SecSystem, a mobile extension of it. It shouldn’t just up and vanish like that. It never had before. You ever wake up one day and find that you had just randomly gone blind for no discernible reason? If you can imagine it, it’s sort of like that.

If something was wrong with SecSystem, if it was down and stayed down, then we were all fucked.

Outside of my internalized freak out, the humans had escalated their argument to a shouting match, which was just wonderful and did absolutely nothing for my nerves.

“I found it,” Shashi was saying to Oktai with a flippant wave of xyr hand.

Oktai was on his feet and red in the face. My threat assessment module estimated he was 9.4 seconds away from taking a swing at xem.

“In the survey zone that I selected for my team! That was my find!” Oktai shouted.

Shashi scoffed. “Oh, please. You’ve been digging there for two weeks and found nothing. It’s not my fault that your useless degree taught you how to make guesses about old civilizations instead of actually finding them.”

My threat assessment revised itself, saying that Oktai was going to strike in 0.3 seconds, 99.7% probability. Someone should probably do something about that. 

Someone like the four SecUnits in the room, whose entire job was to prevent skirmishes like this from becoming bloody. Unless the others’ threat assessment modules were just as borked as my own governor, they should have made a similar assessment of the situation.

None of us moved.

Really, that should have been the most obvious clue up to that point that something was very, very wrong. But my education modules are bad—most of what I did know about my job, I had had to learn from the entertainment feeds—so I didn’t quite connect the dots.

In the end, it was Kapustin who stopped Oktai from spray painting the office wall with Shashi’s blood and teeth. As Oktai cocked his arm back, Kapustin uncrossed her leg, her boot heavy and loud as it hit the floor.

“Enough,” she said.

At that one word, Oktai let his arm fall and straightened—although his face remained painted red with rage—and Sashi’s mocking grin fell from xyr face as xe crossed xyr hands behind xyr back.

I would say that Kapustin was a good leader, if she didn’t unsettle the fuck out of me.

“It doesn’t matter who found it first,” Kapustin said. “It matters where it was found. And who had rights to that survey area.” She turned a hard, flat stare on Oktai. “You should have told me that you had moved your survey area bounds. That wasn’t our land to search. We didn’t have any countermeasures in place.”

“It had the highest probability of success,” Oktai said. He glared again at Shashi pointedly. “It had the three key geological features that were present at the sites of all other remnants found in this sector, and it wasn’t that far outside our property—”

“It was far enough,” Albescu muttered.

“Whatever,” Oktai scoffed. “I’ve been careful. I’ve been searching that area for two weeks without incident. Why am I the bad guy here? Shashi’s the one that was there for one day and got xemself spotted.”

“But I found the remnant,” Shashi sang, which just set off another round of yelling from everyone in the room.

I was locked in a constant cycle of are you fucking kidding me. No matter how bad my education modules were, even I could follow what my dumbass clients were talking about.

Remnants. Alien remnants. The leftover pieces of ancient civilizations that far predated humanity. The original spacefarers, whose salvaged technology had been the basis for transports, stations, the feed, wormhole travel, bots, constructs—everything that had allowed humans to leave their dirtball of an origin planet had been derived from some sort of alien remnant.

They were rare, even rarer now that humans had spread throughout the galaxy and gotten their greedy little fingers into every planet that looked even marginally interesting. Sometimes there were still reports on the news feeds about new remnants found, or new technologies developed from older discoveries. It all made remnants incredibly valuable, and incredibly illegal for private parties to exploit.

The discovery of alien remnants meant that all work had to stop and that, by law, anything that GrayCris had found—alien remnants or the regular stuff I didn’t care about—legally belonged to the company that guaranteed their bond, at least until the bond company decided what they wanted to keep and what did not hold significant value.

Every minute that GrayCris actively chose not to send a message alerting the Company to their discovery was technically a violation of the law, which I suppose paired nicely with the fact that GrayCris had already broken their contract by straying outside of the boundaries of the land option that they had purchased. Not to mention that they had done this by encroaching on the land option another private group had purchased, and had been spotted while doing it.

GrayCris had paid a not insignificant sum in order to keep their excursion to this shitheap off any sort of records available to either the public or to any other group on the planet. GrayCris’s presence was known to the Company and nobody else. Clients did that sometimes, when they were working on some research or whatever that was at threat of being stolen by a competitor, so instead they paid a fortune for it to be stolen by just the Company.

No, it was not legal for the Company to do any of this. Yes, the Corporation Rim authorities knew they did it. No, they weren’t going to stop.

None of this meant shit, though, if the clients went and revealed themselves to somebody through their own damn ineptitude and ended up tattled on.

My clients had tied themselves up into a neat little mess.

“I don’t like this,” Albescu was saying, which was my cue to tune back in to the conversation, since if humans didn’t like something then that meant that I was probably going to hate it.

The shouting had died back down, at least. Oktai and Shashi had taken seats facing Kapustin’s desk, and while Albescu hadn’t abandoned her self-imposed station beside the door, she had wrapped her arms around her torso in a embrace that my trauma response module indicated was a self-soothing tactic.

“We’re sure this is necessary?” Albescu asked when nobody else said anything.

My eyes flicked to the others. Oktai was avoiding looking in Albescu’s direction. Rat’s left leg bounced. Shashi, for the first time, had lost xyr look of smug superiority, instead looking a bit green around the edges of xyr wide face.

Kapustin’s calm, flat affect remained. “This is what we’ve been working towards these past months,” she said. “If we don’t act, then we’ll lose everything.”

Albescu worried her bottom lip between her teeth, then jerked her head in a stiff nod.

What the hell was that about?

That would usually be the point where I would rewind the audio or video recordings from the habitat cameras to figure out what I had missed, but when I reached for HubSystem, I ran into the same wall as when I had tried to connect to SecSystem to access the archived logs.

What the hell was that about?

Kapustin stood abruptly from her chair, her hands planted on the desktop. The others followed suit more slowly.

“Shashi,” Kapustin said. “You were the one spotted, so you will be accompanying me.”

Oktai’s mouth twisted, looking discomforted. “Val, you need more than that, I really should—”

“You need to stay here,” Kapustin said, cutting him off. “You need to begin your study of the remnant. All we’ve done and all we will do will be for nothing if we can’t get anything out of it. We can’t let these sacrifices go to waste.” She nodded towards Rat. “Ratimir will come with to direct the SecUnits. That should be plenty.”

Rat smiled a crooked smile. It wasn’t one of confidence, though, but something more nervous.

I didn’t like that. At all.

I felt another ping on the feed, from Rat again. A silent command came through the private line.

RATIMIR> Report to Hopper Two. Stop by the security ready room first, though. Grab the biggest gun you can find.

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SecUnits are not technically meant for manual labor, even if clients tend to think otherwise.

We can lift far more than a human, sure, but that’s just a byproduct of our construction. Our synthetic muscles are meant to keep us quick and strong enough to break each other or anything else that is deemed in need of breaking. Without them, our organic backups would probably be placed in the weak-to-average span of the human range, but with them, there isn’t much in the way of artificial creatures that’s stronger than us, aside from hauler bots or maybe some of the bot fauna recreations housed in zoos.

This doesn’t mean that SecUnits are designed to lug shit around for humans, but try telling any human that.

That was why I was lugging shit around for humans.

My command had been to clear out the mess hall, so that was what I was doing.

I would rather have been doing almost anything else, but I was choosing to view it as an opportunity. An opportunity to pick at the edges of the commands that clamped like a vise around my inorganic systems, to poke and prod at it the same way that I had with my governor module a little over 45,510 hours ago.

There had been a weakness in my systems—what a surprise—that had originally facilitated the tampering that would deactivate my governor module, a six-second lapse when exiting recharge or repair cycles. During those six seconds, I could shut off my pain sensors in a way that a glitch-free governed SecUnit couldn’t.

During those six seconds, my governor module couldn’t apply punishment, couldn’t touch me, couldn’t even get close. During those six seconds, I was free to pick away at the governor module, applying admin passwords that I had uncovered in other six-second bursts to see which worked and for what, and patching code to cover my tracks to avoid being caught before the next lapse.

It had still taken me almost 613 minutes across forty-three days to complete the hack.

I dropped my cargo into the trench in the dirt, then turned to return to the mess hall to collect my next burden.

Although maybe there wasn’t a point in my hacking efforts. None of the Company admin codes that I had did me any good now, and besides that, I had already walked into DeltFall’s habitat and—

Stop thinking about it.

GrayCris would keep direct command over me for the rest of their stupid mission, during which I would be freed from my paralysis only at their word, watching them cover up DeltFall and the alien remnants. And then at the end of it they would either conveniently lose all of their SecUnits in some sort of expensive tragedy, the cost of which would be a drop in the bucket compared to the incoming fortune from smuggling the remnants out, or they would remove the combat override modules and initiate a memory purge or something to keep their true motives and actions out of the Company’s notice.

I had no idea which option was more likely. At that point, I don’t think I really cared. Either way, at the end of all of this, I would be free of the combat override module.

The mess hall was in the second habitat. It had an exterior door that opened up onto a grassy patch of land by one of the deeper creeks, a picturesque view for anybody in the mess hall to enjoy if they didn’t want to stay inside. Logistically, it was a security nightmare, but it gave me easy access to the mess hall and the bloody scene that I had—

Stop thinking about it.

There had been three DeltFall personnel in the mess hall, at a table in the far corner. There was only one left in there now, and that number would soon drop to zero once I had hauled the body out to the...actually, I don’t know what it was supposed to be. A mass grave? A food bowl for the indigenous fauna? Whatever it was, it had been hastily dug by the overridden DeltFall Unit, and I had already almost filled it.

Five from the second habitat common room. One from the second habitat communal restroom, hair wet and still wrapped in their robe. Two in the doorway outside of the mess hall, and now, as I stomped outside and flung the crumpled body into the pit, the three from inside of the mess hall, too.

There were more, I knew. One in the hall fifteen feet from the bulkhead between the second habitat and the third, and another in the hall at the bulkhead between the second and the first. One in the communications control center.

Three more in the hall beyond that, improvised weapons in their hands and holes in their heads—

Stop fucking thinking about it.

My command had been to clear the mess hall. Since that was completed, I wouldn’t be able to move until the next one was received, so I was just stuck standing there, staring down into the corpse pit.

Some of them seemed to stare back.

I don’t know how long I stood there. At some point my focus...slid away, kind of. I drifted, watching from over my shoulder as my body kept its silent vigil, the gore slowly drying on my gloves.

I was pulled back into my body by Rat, who sent a ping to check my workflow queue. I returned a responding ping automatically, telling him that my queue was empty.

RATIMIR> Come to the communications control center.

I jerked into motion, pivoting to stride back into the mess hall, and then through that into the halls of the second habitat.

GrayCris personnel darted around like schools of small, shallow-water fish. Most of them were from Rat’s team, but I could recognize a few from Shashi’s team and Oktai’s team as well. All of them parted to let me pass, their faces pale, their eyes wide but gazes firmly averted.

If I was a squishy human, I wouldn’t stand in the way of the big, silent, blood-soaked SecUnit, either.

I don’t know when the other GrayCris personnel had shown up. My memories of the past half a day were patchy, brief bursts of horror blanketed by long stretches of numb drifting. They had appeared during one of those stretches. The habitats had been emptied of human life one blink and then overwhelmed by a swarm of them the next.

From what I could tell, they were stripping DeltFall of anything of value. Extra supplies or materials, data ripped from personal devices, samples of rocks and flora. Anything and everything that they thought they could make off with without being caught later, they were scurrying away with to the two GrayCris hoppers that they had arrived in. I was pretty sure Kapustin and Oktai were directing that endeavor, and the thirteen people completing it.

There were three other GrayCris personnel in the communications control center.

One was Shashi, who stood over the shoulder of xyr team’s systems specialist, Esen. The two of them were at one of the desktop feed displays, talking quickly but quietly to one another, making sharp gestures at the display.

There was a crumpled body in the room, too, jammed up in the wiring beneath the desktop interface. But it was a DeltFall member, so I didn’t know who they were. The body was what Rat was staring at, though, his face pinched with distaste and something else that I couldn’t identify.

He twitched when I entered the room.

I stopped abruptly, the command completed.

“There you are,” he huffed, as if the directive to come to the control center hadn’t been sent only 87 seconds ago. He snapped his fingers and pointed to the body under the desk. “We can’t work with that in here.”

That’s nice. That wasn’t a command, though.

RATIMIR> Get this out of here. And do it carefully. I don’t want guts spilled all over the floor.

Rat frowned at the ground. “Any more guts,” he corrected out loud.

“What?” Shashi asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then hush,” Shashi said. “We’re trying to work, here.”

I folded myself into an uncomfortable ball and jammed myself up beneath the desktop interface. The corpse was contorted even worse than I was, tangled in the wiring, as if they had thought they could climb up into the desktop interface’s innards and hide there.

Humans made some strange decisions when they were afraid, I had learned. Or maybe it wasn’t a decision at all, just instinct. I don’t know. Either way, it hadn’t worked.

I could remember watching them drag themselves across the ground, away from me and the other SecUnits, leaving a solid stripe of blood on the floor as they went. I remembered the sounds that they had made when the DeltFall Unit had delivered the final round, right through their throat.

I couldn’t access my memory storage, but my organic memory was functioning well enough to recall that.

I could have just torn them free and been done with it, but my risk assessment module put the chances of spilling farther gore at 42% if I did that, and the chances of doing serious damage to the wiring of the desktop interface at 76%. Also that wouldn’t have been doing it carefully, as I had been ordered, so the module wouldn’t let me either way.

I wanted to break something. But at the same time, staring at the broken body in front of me, I really, really didn’t.

“Certainly doesn’t seem like it,” Rat griped. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to Shashi, and not that the combat override module had secretly been feeding him my thoughts and opinions this entire time.

“Excuse you,” Shashi said.

“It’s not my fault they paid for a completely different encryption package,” Esen said, his voice laced with frustration. “It’s not one of the ones I’ve put a lot of hours into. I’ll figure it out, just give me a bit. We’ll get into the HubSystem backend servers eventually.”

“We don’t have a bit, and we’re all out of eventualies,” Shashi groaned. “We need in before HubSystem gets suspicious of the repeated lockdowns and tattles on us to the Company. We need to send an all-clear or something.”

Esen scoffed. “HubSystem can’t do that.”

He was right. SecSystem could, though. But if SecSystem was going to get suspicious of the lockdown being lifted, reinstated, and then lifted again, it would have already done so, and we were all already fucked anyway.

For twenty agonizing minutes, I carefully unthreaded the wires that strung up the corpse like a macabre marionette, the silence occasionally punctuated by muttered swears from Esen.

And then, Esen said, “Got it!” which was followed almost immediately by: “Uh oh.”

“Uh oh?” Shashi echoed. Xyr chair squeaked as xe scrambled to sit up out of the bored slouch xe had sunk into. “What? Did HubSystem snitch already?”

Rat’s legs swept into view, just barely visible in the corner of my eye. He leaned over the desktop interface, boxing me in underneath it.

Oh, I really didn’t like that.

“Shit,” Rat agreed.

Not for the first time, I wished that I was able to connect to the cameras in the room, or just directly hack HubSystem myself, or take control of any of the drones that were sitting dormant in Hopper Two. Then I would be able to see what was going on, instead of having to rely on the humans saying enough for me to piece things together.

“That’s a lot,” Shashi said. “Right? That seems like a lot.”

Esen hummed. “There’s five. All are tagged as emergencies.”

A moment of silence, then a voice crackled through the desktop’s inbuilt speakers. The audio quality was shit, the signal patchy and rife with static. If I had been in full control of myself and my systems, I probably could have cleaned up the audio file by calculating probabilities and running projections based on what I could clearly make out and other context clues, copying the voice signature using common phonemes, and patching in an approximation of the garbled sections, but in the absence of those, I just had to make a few wild guesses.

It was a woman’s voice, I was fairly sure. Her voice was confident and firm, although she still spoke at a tempo that I would usually associate with someone experiencing a high degree of stress. She said something about an expedition, a creature, an attack. A SecUnit. Three casualties. Failing systems, an inoperative med bay. Someone was dead. They needed help.

The other messages were all the same: A quick report followed by a plea for aid.

The other group. The other mission. PreservationAux.

“Shit,” Rat huffed. “Okay, yeah, that one was us.”

“Their MedSystem?” Shashi asked.

“Yeah,” Rat said. “I mean, before they got here, but yeah. It was one of the malware bundles that was supposed to keep them away. You know, disguised as regular systems malfunctions so the Company wouldn’t clear their site for habitation. They were delayed a couple months, but those useless hippies wouldn’t give up and withdraw their bid, and we were spending too much time on it, so... The Company must have missed that one.”

“Well, it didn’t stop them from coming, but it’s certainly achieving something else,” Esen said. “Look at this last message. They sent a text file this time.”

Another moment of silence as they read.

“Fuck,” Rat said.

“Fuck,” Shashi agreed, xyr voice edged with a growing hysteria. “We need to tell Kapustin. This is— We need Kapustin now.”

“Shashi—” Rat began, but Shashi cut him off.

“No!” xe cried. “Why the hell were we trying to keep them off the planet? Their option was on another continent! They never would have crossed paths with us, not like DeltFall, and now they’re calling in the Company! We are so, so fucked.”

“Kapustin didn’t want more people here,” Rat snapped back. “It’s not like we knew this was going to happen when we were sending the bundles! Either they would have given up, or the Company would wipe their systems and cover for us without knowing. It wasn’t a problem then—”

“Yeah, well it is now,” Shashi said. “Esen, can you hack it? Stop the launch?”

“Maybe if I had direct access to their HubSystem I could, I don’t know, delete the priming protocol so it just blows up on the launch pad,” Esen said, “but I can’t do anything remotely. Not from a continent away.” He shifted in his chair again. “Besides, that would take time, and we, uh, don’t have that. Look up.”

Rat took several steps away from the desktop interface. Shashi rolled xemself into the middle of the room. From my angle, I had just barely enough of an unimpeded view of the glass dome overhead to follow their wide-eyed gazes up.

Far above the dome, something as bright as a star was inching across the sky, trailing a thick ribbon of gray smoke.

PreservationAux had launched their emergency beacon.

Well. That was that, then.

The Company would be coming to the planet early. Even with the five days that would take, there was very little chance that GrayCris would have enough time to cover their tracks thoroughly enough to avoid detection if the Company decided to check in on their other bonded clients while they were here. Which they absolutely would, since it let them charge a hefty wellness check fee.

“Can you hack that?” Shashi asked. “Make it divebomb?”

“I’d have an easier time shooting it out of the sky with Two’s rifle,” Esen said. “You know hacking isn’t a universal fix, right? You watch the entertainment feeds too much.”

Rat took a step closer to the desktop interface. He was squinting at something on one of the displays that Esen wasn’t working at.

“What about a missile?” Rat asked.

“What?” Esen and Shashi asked in unison.

Yeah, what they said: What.

“A missile,” Rat repeated instead of adding anything helpful for half-blind murderbots, and pointed to the display he was staring at.

Esen rolled closer in his chair, blocking my view of Rat and the dome, and the far-off beacon’s exhaust trail that was splitting the sky.

“Oh,” Esen breathed.

“You’re crazy, Rat,” Shashi said.

“Only if it doesn’t work,” Rat said. Then, to Esen, he said, “Can you make that work?”

“I don’t— That’s—” Esen sputtered. “My augments don’t have that kind of processing power. It’s moving too fast, and I know the wormhole’s on the other side of the planet right now but I don’t actually know where it is. And I’m not a transport engineer or wormhole specialist. They may be able to calculate those trajectory parameters on the fly, but not me.”

“So if you had something with more processing power that could calculate the trajectories for you, then you’d be able to do it?”

Dread made its home in my chest like it had never left.

Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it never will.

Esen breathed an explosive huff. “Yes. Probably.”

“Okay,” Rat said.

RATIMIR> Discontinue your previous task and report to me immediately.

I pulled my hands away from the nearly-freed corpse as if touching it burned. I lurched out from beneath the table and rose to my feet as quickly as I could move; the humans flinched as, to them, I went from kneeling under the table to on my feet by Rat in the blink of an eye.

“Rat—” Shashi began, but Rat cut xem off.

“This’ll work. Trust me. I read this thing’s manual,” Rat said.

Nobody likes an overachiever, especially if that overachiever was working against you.

RATIMIR> Calculate the input parameters to intercept the emergency beacon overhead right now. Do it, fast, and give the results to Esen.

“Please wait while I process your request,” my mouth said. It pulled from my buffer, because every inorganic processor I had was suddenly focused inwards, churning through calculations at a rapid pace.

The request was ridiculous. It should have been impossible. Esen had said that he wasn’t an engineer, and I’m sure as shit not one, either. I don’t know anything about transports or rockets or anything like that. I could fly a hopper, but that was it, and even that was only because I had skimmed the hopper’s operator manual before deleting it at the start of the contract.

But all bots and constructs are good at mathematics. Most if not all of our ability to think was due to inorganic processors, and if there’s one thing processors are good at, it is quick calculations. As long as one of us has the knowledge on how to complete a certain calculation, as long as the equations are relevant to our existence, then we’re really, really good at them, because so much of what we do relies on constantly running a battery of calculations.

How quickly to move, so as to not unsettle our clients. How much strength is appropriate for a given situation. The most efficient routes to take, the most efficient methods to use, the most efficient ways to keep the humans around us happy or safe or productive.

SecUnits, though, have a few extra inbuilt specialties by necessity. Our threat assessment and risk assessment modules are always running calculations to ascertain the probability of certain actions resulting in desirable outcomes. Our security and defense modules—less specialized versions of combat modules—calculate the most efficient ways to beat the shit out of anything that needs the shit beaten out of it.

Sometimes—most of the times—the most efficient ways to beat the shit out of things involved shooting it, usually from a distance or from less-than-ideal positions, and almost always trying to hit something that was trying just as hard to avoid getting hit.

Tracking, aiming, firing. Trajectories, angles and vectors, compensations for gravity or motion or air density. It’s all just math. And I’m very good at that type of math.

And Rat, who had apparently read my manual, knew that, too.

It took 3.2 seconds.

And then I did nothing.

For a moment, I felt something approaching relief. I had the input parameters that were requested, but I had no way of handing them over. I couldn’t access the feeds for a direct data transfer to the desktop display or to Esen himself. The combat override module relegated me to comms control only, which wouldn’t allow for file transfers even if the communications on my end weren’t limited to simple ping responses to direct status queries.

I had the parameters because the override had forced me to calculate them, but because of the override, they were just as stuck inside my systems as I was.

Rat hadn’t thought of that little obstacle. So. Ha, take that.

Except 0.3 seconds after my overridden systems came to the same conclusion that I had, the override dove into my buffer. It edited one of my canned responses, wiping its contents and saving over it with the calculations’ results.

It shouldn’t have been able to do that. Editing buffer files isn’t something that a governed SecUnit is supposed to be able to do. It isn’t something a governed SecUnit would ever consider doing, because it was technically redefining permitted behaviors. An overridden governed SecUnit wouldn’t ever consider doing it, either, but my systems had done it almost automatically, without hesitation.

The command had been to get the information to Esen, and the override meant that I would be forced to complete the command by any means necessary. As a rogue, I have a lot of means beyond the typical SecUnit.

As far as I know, a rogue SecUnit has never been overridden before me. I don’t know why I never considered that that may change things, or how that may change things. I never considered what might happen if a construct was turned into a puppet while possessing knowledge and experience and custom-coded routines that no other non-rogue construct would ever possess.

I tried to dump dummy data into the file—transpose even one digit, and the data would be useless—but I slammed into another permissions error so hard that it left me reeling.

By the time I had recovered and dismissed the slew of error messages, it was too late.

The audio file had already been queued in my buffer. Esen had already entered the parameters. The desktop displays were already reporting the successful launch of DeltFall’s beacon, the default launch countdown and flight path overridden and re-programmed thanks to my input.

We all watched in silent, tense trepidation as a second star climbed into the sky, originating from a few kilometers away. Its ascent was slow, and for 103 seconds, it looked like it was going to miss.

But, well. I’m good at math. And as much as I half-ass my job, I’m not actually bad at it if I try—or if I’m forced to try.

A brighter, larger burst of light bloomed in the sky, high up in the atmosphere. I didn’t know if it was too far away to hear the explosion, but even if it had been close enough, I didn’t hear anything over Rat, Shashi and Esen, who were cheering and slamming their hands on the table in celebration.

My task was complete. So I was stuck staring up through the dome as the light was swallowed by a faint puff of black smoke.

“We should tell Kapustin, though, right?” Shashi asked as the celebration died down. “We blew up their beacon. They’ll know something’s up, now. Something besides just a regular malfunction.”

A brief pause.

“I’ve told her,” Rat said. “She’s on her way here. She said...well, we’re going to have to deal with this, too.”

Another pause.

“As in...” Shashi trailed off.

Xe didn’t want to say it. None of them did.

“Yes,” Rat finally said.

The gore on my hands and armor didn’t weigh much, but it felt unbearable nonetheless. I wanted nothing more than to throw it all into the recycler. Maybe I would throw myself in after it.

RATIMIR> Return to your previous task.

I crammed myself back under the table, and this time, I didn’t try and fight it.

Chapter Text

I was once again standing in the cargo pod of Hopper Two, with no desire to be there.

Kapustin had been talking with Rat in the hall outside of the communications control center for almost three minutes by the time I had finally extricated the corpse from beneath the desktop interface without any bits falling off. They probably thought they were speaking in private, but in case it isn’t a known fact, SecUnit hearing is very good.

And now that I’ve said that, whatever you think our hearing range is, you should probably double it. And that’s assuming that there isn’t a drone or some other type of listening device that the SecUnit can tap in to. In general, if there is a SecUnit anywhere nearby, it’s best to just assume that it can hear you.

Kapustin was displeased with everything Rat was saying, which would have been hilarious if it didn’t involve me. Hers was a calm kind of displeasure, though, which was somehow worse. I was used to humans that yelled when they got angry, humans that got physical. Even when humans got mad at me for one reason or another but were too afraid to actually hit me, I could tell when they wanted to.

This was different than that.

Rat explained that PreservationAux had launched their emergency beacon, and all Kapustin had said was, “All right,” in a frigid tone.

I would almost rather she just hit me. Or Rat. Hitting Rat would be better.

And then Rat began to detail his plan of repurposing DeltFall’s beacon into an interceptor missile, and that it had worked—hooray—but that was why PreservationAux was an actual problem now, probably.

“Where did you pull the trajectory data from?” Kapustin had asked.

“Two calculated it,” Rat had said. “I read its manual, and its weapons systems—”

“But how did it impart the data,” Kapustin had interrupted.

Rat had paused. “It...it told Esen what to input.”

Kapustin had hummed, then told Rat to continue. She hadn’t spoken again after that.

I had been standing in the middle of the control center, holding the detangled corpse for thirty seconds—Rat’s command hadn’t actually told me what to do with it after I freed it—before the door slid open, and Kapustin and Rat had stepped into the room. Kapustin had stared at the corpse in my arms with detached disinterest for a moment, before her eyes dragged upwards to stare at me.

She had held my gaze, or near enough to it, through my faceplate.

SecUnits can’t sweat, but I felt like I wanted to sweat.

“You disabled the emergency beacon,” she had finally said.

I hadn’t answered, because that wasn’t actually a command over comms, and it wasn’t actually a question. Also, “disabling” was a funny way of saying “blowing the fuck up.”

“Uh, yeah,” Esen had said from where he had still been sitting behind me. He hadn’t moved much since I had dragged the corpse out from beneath the desktop interface. “That was me.”

Kapustin’s gaze had slid off of me to meet Esen’s eyes over my shoulder. “Well done,” she had said, her tone clipped.

She hadn’t been speaking to me at all. I had felt relief at that, at least as much as I was able; I hadn’t realized that my performance reliability, already abysmal, had been ticking downward until she had stopped staring at me.

“Have they indicated that they know what happened?” Kapustin had asked, moving around me and my burden to stand by Esen.

“No,” Esen had said. “They sent another text file a few minutes ago, saying that their beacon had suffered a catastrophic systems failure, but that’s it.”

“Did they ask DeltFall to launch theirs?” Kapustin had asked.

“No,” Esen had said.

“Did they ask for help of any kind in this last message?”

Esen had hesitated a few seconds longer before saying, “No.”

“Then they know,” Kapustin had said. “Or they think they know, and they’re trying to make us think that they don’t. I’ve been reading about this group and their origin. They’re all altruists.” She had said the word like it was an insult, like it burned her tongue. “People like that think everybody else is naturally as helpful as they are unless they have a reason not to be. If they stopped asking for help, it’s because they think DeltFall has a reason to not provide it.”

Kapustin had turned and strode back towards the door, then, but she paused in the doorway. To Rat, she had said, “Take three SecUnits with you.”

“Why do I have to go?” Rat had asked, borderline whined. “Make Oktai go. Or call in Albescu and have her—”

“You’re going,” Kapustin had said. Her eyes had been on me again. “Because Two is yours. Bring it and two others.”

And then she had left, leaving Rat to spit and curse and vent his frustrations in peace.

Rat had never been one of the ones afraid to hit me.

Anyway. That was how I ended up back in Hopper Two.

From what I could gather, Kapustin and Oktai were staying back at DeltFall’s habitat, finishing the cleanup and waiting for the other half of DeltFall to return from their expedition, now that they didn’t have to worry about DeltFall returning and triggering their beacon. They had kept the overridden DeltFall SecUnit with them, as well as Oktai’s SecUnit, Three. Three was indisposed in a cubicle on account of it not having any legs at the moment, but it was well on its way to being repaired, and would be up on its new feet by the time DeltFall’s HubSystem said that the expedition team was due back at the habitat.

Rat and Shashi were trading off piloting shifts, and I knew that Esen and two more of Shashi’s team had joined them in the crew cabin. Five and Six, Shashi’s and Albescu’s SecUnits, were in the cargo pod with me, rifles on their backs and armor stained brown in patches by dried gore.

We flew for what was subjectively two years, but was objectively a little over a day and a half. I didn’t keep track of the exact amount of time, how fast we were flying, or in what direction. I had before on our way to DeltFall to try and calculate where we were going and for what purpose, but I didn’t need that this time.

It didn’t matter where exactly we were going, because I knew generally where we were going, and I had a pretty good idea of what we were going to do when we got there.

I did try to go back to mapping the edges of the override, poking around for some sort of exploit. But every failure ticked my performance reliability down another half a point, and with my media still blocked off and unable to help me manage that, I had to stop more often than I would have liked and wait for it to raise again.

When I felt Hopper Two slowing down to an appropriate speed to make a landing, I knew that I had run out of time for that, too.

We set down with a swaying lurch. The roar of the engines softened to a rumble, but they were still idling by the time the door to the cargo pod rolled open and Rat ordered all of us to pile out.

The hopper had set down on a wide open patch of dusty ground. The topsoil had been blown away in a wide radius, the dry ground beneath worn flat. The ground always ended up looking like that after enduring weeks of repeated hopper take-offs and landings.

We had set down in a hopper landing field, one wide enough for three of the smaller hopper models—or maybe one large hopper and one small hopper—but it was completely empty. However many hoppers had been kept here, they were all gone now.

Not far from the landing field sat the smallest habitat I had ever seen. Although it was one of the more spacious options, the habitat consisted of only one oblong dome, its glass panels opaqued in the early afternoon light, the composite base decorated with sun-faded geometric designs painted in an array of colors.

Those had to be against some sort of policy in the habitat rental agreement.

SecUnits don’t care for one another, but I found myself very nearly pitying whatever SecUnit had been saddled with these clients. One habitat unit meant that all of the clients would be in close proximity to one another, constantly. The very thought of how many conflicts that would cause made my performance reliability dip for a few seconds, and I wasn’t even the SecUnit that had to deal with that. The security ready room would be near all of the clients, too, which just heightened the almost-pity for the SecUnit.

Also, it was probably about to be fit with a combat override module and turned into a gun-puppet. So. If I was ever going to pity a murderbot, it was probably going to be now.

The habitat was dark and quiet. The landing field was host to our hopper and no others. Between the habitat and the landing field, a small number of crates and cases lay abandoned in the dirt.

“They’re not here,” Rat shouted over the rumble of Hopper Two’s idling engines.

He and I had come to the same conclusion. I hated that.

“You don’t know that,” Shashi shouted back, shading xyr eyes with xyr hand as xe peered at the dark dome of the habitat. “They could be hiding inside.” Xe waved xyr hand at Esen, who was crouched by the front door of the habitat, his head buried in a panel that he had pried open next to the access interface. “They locked down their habitat. Why would they do that if they left?”

“Why would they hide their hoppers if they stayed?” Rat asked, gesturing to the empty field around us.

“Maybe some left and some stayed.”

“They didn’t answer the radio,” Rat said.

“I wouldn’t, either, if I thought that whoever had sabotaged me would be coming around to say hello,” Shashi said. “I’d hide and pretend no one was home. They’re here still, I know it.”

“They’re not.” Rat turned on his heels slowly, scanning the sky and the distant treeline, his face pinched with displeasure. Finally, he turned back to Shashi. “Fifty credits.”

Shashi scoffed. “Rookie numbers. Five hundred.”

“You’re fucking joking.”

“No,” Shashi said. “I’m fucking right.”

Rat growled. “Fine. Five hundred credits.” He pointed at the hopper. “But you’re doing the sweep.”

Shashi snorted, tossing xyr hands up. “You mean I get to sit in a climate-controlled hopper while you stand around and sweat your ass off out here, and I get five hundred credits at the end of it? Sure.” Xe fiddled with xyr external interface. After a moment, Five peeled off from where we stood at attention, and tromped back into the cargo pod. “I’m taking my SecUnit, though.”

Rat waved a hand dismissively, his attention back on the treeline.

“Esen will keep working on disabling the lockdown,” Shashi said as xe walked back up the gangway. The ramp pulled in and the rear doors closed on xyr grin as xe called, “Ping me when he gets in and you find them!”

Half a minute later, the engines roared, the hopper lifted into the sky, and the downdraft nearly threw all of us off of our feet. The hopper swung left, and then set off at a sedate pace to begin a low-flying sweep of the hilly grasslands and copses of trees to the west.

“Where’s xe going?” Esen called from where he was still jamming himself halfway into the opened wall, as if he was planning on just tunneling in that way.

“To lose a bet,” Rat responded.

RATIMIR> Secure a perimeter and then maintain a patrol. Ping me if you see any non-GrayCris personnel, but do not engage.

That was the first command in the past two days that I actually wanted to follow.

Six and I circled the habitat in opposite directions, stopping every ten meters to face the untamed wilderness beyond the habitat and scan for anything notable. Once the first full circuit was completed, we settled into a standard patrol pattern, completing a lap of the building every three minutes. That meant that every three minutes, I passed close enough to the front door to pick up bits and pieces of the idle chatter between Rat and Esen.

PreservationAux had locked down their habitat a little over two hours before we had arrived, which meant that they had been gone—if they were gone—for probably about that long. The lockdown was set to only fall if it was supplied with a series of passcodes entered from the feed address of whoever was the primary contact for their contract. The primary contact had opted to use custom passcodes instead of the defaults, which was honestly a little surprising, considering most clients I had worked for never bothered to change passcodes from their defaults.

The Company did that a lot, too.

“That’s not the biggest issue,” Esen said on one of my passes. “You said these guys are from a freehold planet, right? They’re not from the Corporation Rim?”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Rat said. He was lounging on the front steps behind Esen, leaning back so his face was in the shade. “Why?”

“Someone in their group knows more about proprietary system structures than I would expect from anybody living outside the Rim,” Esen replied. “I would shake this person’s hand if we weren’t here to...you know. They hacked their HubSystem and scrambled it. They basically made up their own structure that I can’t figure out, and they convinced their SecSystem to not give a shit about the tampering.”

“And that’s...impressive?”

“If they did this in under two days? Then it’s beyond impressive. I certainly couldn’t do it.”

Esen was right. That was impressive—for a human, anyway. Also, fascinatingly paranoid. Though not nearly paranoid enough, in my opinion; I would have planted a kill code to fry the systems of anything that tried to tamper with my system restructure. But that’s just me.

By the time I circled around again, the conversation had moved on to some inane topic that I didn’t care about—human sports, ugh, boring bullshit—so I stopped listening.

The sun set, the sky bleeding orange then purple then an inky blue, and Esen still hadn’t made much headway in convincing the habitat’s HubSystem to rescind the lockdown. Six and I had circled so many times that we had carved twin trails in wide arcs around the habitat by the time the flare streaked into the sky.

I heard the pop of sound of a flare gun as Six and I were about to cross paths on the rear side of the habitat. We both stopped, faces turned upwards as the flare rose to hang just over the trees around fifty meters to the east. It bathed the area below it in a cherry-red light, illuminating the woman who stood just beyond the treeline in its bloody glow, the hand gripping the flare gun still extended up over her head even as she stared me and Six down.

She was short, or at least shorter than me, with dark skin and her hair cut close to her scalp. Her expression was set in what I could probably describe as determination, but I was fairly sure that I could see a slight tremor in the hand that wielded the flare gun.

She clutched an external interface in her other hand. She raised it to press to her forehead once Rat and Esen jogged around the habitat.

“What the—” Rat started to say, but cut himself off with a jerk. He raised a hand to hurriedly slap at his own interface, hooked over his ear. His jaw clenched, his eyes darting as he accessed the feed.

“Open the feed,” Esen said. Then, a moment later. “Rat, it’s set to private, open the feed.”

Rat shushed Esen. Another few seconds passed in silence, Rat and the woman just staring at one another, Rat’s jaw occasionally twitching as he subvocalized his responses into the feed.

Then, “She’s requesting to meet peacefully,” Rat said. “She’s been watching us, and she knows we’re not DeltFall. She wants to negotiate safety for her people.”

That was stupid. That was so stupid I couldn’t even think of the words to properly explain how unbelievably fucking stupid that was.

She knew that we weren’t DeltFall, which meant that she knew that we were a mysterious party that, for some reason, didn’t want anybody to know that it was here. She knew that her group had been sabotaged in order to prevent them from leaving the planet, which when paired up with the fact that GrayCris wanted its presence to remain a secret, meant that anything that we wanted was probably not in the best interests of her and her people.

She had apparently been watching us for hours, probably since we had landed, and she knew all these things. She should have tried to take us out from the treeline. She should have rigged one of their hoppers with an explosive and set its autopilot to fly itself into us once it was clear we weren’t leaving.

Instead, she was trying to negotiate. She was trying for peace.

All she was going to get was killed.

“Who is she?” Esen asked.

RATIMIR> Set permissible boundary to one kilometer.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rat said. “She’s dead either way.” He sniffed. “Shashi owes me five hundred credits.”

RATIMIR> Kill her. And bring me her interface. Don't break it.

Six and I took off for the treeline at a dead sprint.

The flare died.

The woman ran.

Chapter Text

Fifty meters of open ground stood between us and the treeline.

Six and I could cover that in two seconds. Theoretically.

If we had been running on different terrain—something flatter, something less cluttered by rocks and bushes and trees—then we would have caught the woman in under three seconds flat. But there was a tradeoff for our immense speeds.

The fauna that our speed had been modeled off of all had long tails to act as counterbalances or specialized feet to create leverage. We have inorganic feet that are designed to function similarly—kind of—but the idiots that built us stuck us in human-shaped boots anyway and negated that advantage, and we definitely don’t have tails, either.

What I'm saying is that if we’re going at our top speed, then we can’t really turn that well.

As it just so happens, there is a lot of turning required if you’re going to sprint through a dense forest.

For the universe’s best killing machines, our design is kind of crap.

The woman had been maybe half a meter from the treeline, so when we broke into a sprint towards her, she turned and melted into the shadows beneath the canopy with barely a step.

Six and I slowed as we reached the treeline, bleeding off speed before we leapt into the undergrowth. We surged through the tall bushes that grew in bunches at the bases of the trees, tore through the twisting vines that hung from the branches overhead. By the time we adjusted our pace to something that wasn’t almost hurtling us straight into trees, we were barely moving faster than a standard human.

The gap between us and the woman slowly shrank, but she maintained her lead better than I would have expected. She was nimble, small and agile in a way that we weren’t. Our tactic, as much as it could be called that, was to just barrel through everything in our way, but she dipped and ducked, putting as much of the forest between herself and us as possible.

We were the cheetahs and she was the mouse, but here in the dense forest, it turned out that she had the advantage.

But she was only human. I knew that it was unlikely that she had any sort of endurance training, which meant that soon she would tire. SecUnits get tired, too—at least, our organics do, which is a stupid design in my opinion—but it takes much more for us to reach that point. We would outlast her.

We were outlasting her.

The gap was closing more and more, faster and faster.

A mere 93 seconds after the pursuit had first began, the woman’s fifty-meter lead had shrank to a little less than twenty. But still she ran, even as the rhythm of her footfalls began to falter, her erratic weaving between trees and bushes and rocks growing slower and more infrequent.

We burst out of the undergrowth and into an area of thinned trees, cut through in the center by a gorge that, by the sound of it, dropped down into a river. It wasn’t too wide of a gorge, but it was more than a human could cross unassisted. I was therefore incredibly baffled that the woman didn’t turn or slow down, and instead charged right towards it as if she was going to try anyway.

She didn’t try.

Before she hit the edge, she dropped into a slide, skidding to a stop barely more than a meter from the drop-off. She popped back up onto her knees, and tore a tarp from what looked like a pile of garbage.

Its base form was a large metal cylinder that came up to around my knees and was about half as wide as it was tall. A number of circuit boards, ferrite core inductors, and a lattice of woven wire and adhesive tape stretched across the surface of the cylinder. On top of the whole thing sat a control panel that had clearly been pulled from a ground transport, frayed wires sticking out from the back like the multicolored legs of some sort of insectoid fauna.

To anybody else, it probably looked like a mound of trash, or maybe some awful attempt at art. But I’m a murderbot, and I know a bomb when I see one.

The woman held her interface out in front of her like an offering, the ancient bulky model shielding parts of her face as her hand and arm shook.

That was the only thing that saved her life.

We didn’t pull our rifles. Rat had commanded us to bring the interface back undamaged, and according to my risk assessment module, there was an 87% probability that the rounds from our rifles would clip the interface and destroy it if we took the shot just then. The rifles were too big, too powerful. They were meant to be a viable option for fighting off fauna more than ten times our mass, after all, not for usage against one small human holding the thing that we were told to grab.

Using the rifles would be a disproportionate approach to the task. It would be like using a kinetic orbital strike to eradicate a fauna infestation in the grounds around a habitat and then getting surprised or upset when the strike obliterated the habitat, too.

We raised our arms instead, our gunports snapping open. But we still didn’t fire, nor did we advance. Our inbuilt guns were more accurate than the rifles, at least at such close range, but the woman still had a damn bomb. Setting it off would complete the first half of the command we had been given, sure, but it would destroy the interface, too. The overrides wouldn’t let us move or engage so long as there was a significant probability that doing so would cause her to trigger the device.

Not that I particularly wanted to engage the target, but whatever.

I didn’t want to do this again.

My systems focused in on the woman, flying through constant calculations and reassessments as it waited for a suitable opening. On my right, Six was likely doing the same thing.

Neither of us moved.

For six tense seconds, only the rushing of the river and the gasping breaths of the woman chased away the silence. The woman’s gaze flickered back and forth between my faceplate and Six’s, the pale ringslight from overhead flashing across her dark, wide eyes.

“You can—” the woman began, her shoulders heaving as she gasped, “you can still stop.” Her voice was thin, strained. It quavered, from both too much fear and too little oxygen. Humans really should probably be using supplementary oxygen on this shitty planet. “Whoever you’re working for, whatever they want. Tell them— Tell them that we can still negotiate.” Her arm drifted lower. “We can talk about this—”

I took the shot.

She tried to duck, but she wasn’t fast enough.

They’re never fast enough.

She jerked as the energy round slammed into her, the interface ripped from her hands. It fell and collided with the bomb, snagging on wires and snapping one of the inductors out of alignment on its way down.

As it dropped, so too did the woman. She collapsed behind the bulk of the body of the bomb with a wet, strangled sound.

I watched, numb, as my task list updated.

I felt myself start to drift again, caught in the riptide of apathy.

I didn’t want to do this again. But that didn’t matter.

But I couldn’t drift away—not fully. Because the bomb was emitting a high-pitched whine that built and built and built.

Generally speaking, that is not what you want a bomb to be doing when it’s within twenty meters of you.

The bomb rattled. It crackled and buzzed, arcs of electricity racing through the turns of the coil like they were being pulled from the air, drawn in towards the central cylinder.

I thought I could taste the static building in the air, could feel it prickling my organic flesh.

Movement, just behind the bomb.

The woman hauled herself up, her right arm pinned to her side, her left scrabbling for purchase. Her face was ashen, her expression a maelstrom of nausea and pain and fear, and stone-cold resolve.

Her hand slammed down on the transport control panel.

Everything around me dissolved.

Chapter Text

The bomb didn’t explode, technically, because the bomb wasn’t technically a bomb.

It looked like a bomb. It sounded like a bomb. But when the woman pressed the detonator, the device didn’t burst into a cloud of fire and shrapnel with enough kinetic force to turn poor murderbots into unhappy smears on the forest floor.

Instead, the world fizzled like a weak connection to a dying feed. My vision was overcome with static, my hearing overtaken by a deafening drone. Every haptic sensor in my body went haywire.

I felt like I could feel the magnetic field bending around me, the disruption flowing like an impending tsunami. It pulled, dragging my body forward by centimeters, towards some epicenter that I couldn’t see.

And then the wave hit.

It threw me off my feet. Or maybe my feet just dropped out from beneath me, my legs failing, and the full-body convulsion that accompanied it just made me think that I was thrown off of my feet.

I don’t know. I was too busy dropping into a forced reboot to really care about the difference.

If it walks like a bomb and talks like a bomb, then it may be an EMP.

The reboot began before I had even hit the ground. It took only a few seconds, but it felt like it dragged for an eternity, because in those few seconds my systems started and failed and started again in fitful bursts. Each burst brought wave after wave of pain as my inorganics repeatedly overloaded themselves.

It was during one of those waves that I noticed that the combat override module had been knocked offline, too. The reboot diagnostic reported it as fully functional and reinitializing, but it kept flickering and faltering as it wormed its way back through my systems to reestablish its control.

I lunged, reaching out for the override before it could draw the wall of permissions errors back around itself.

It bat me away as if I was nothing.

I reached out again, grasping, searching for anything that would give me just a bit of leverage.

I found the system that controlled my inorganic muscles, not yet back under the command of the override.

With a thought, I deactivated my inorganic muscles.

My body went limp, every inorganic muscle in my body feeling like it was caught in one big simultaneous cramp.

It lasted for less than a second. Then the override swept right in, bundled up that system, and swept it away from me. It reactivated my inorganic muscles.

I had been too slow in my poking around. Or the override was faster than me, maybe, built better and with newer, more powerful processors. I don’t know. The effect was the same either way: Six seconds after the reboot had started, all of my systems had been ripped away from me again.

I needed more time. If I had just had a little more fucking time, I might have been able to...I don’t know. Come up with something, maybe. A more sophisticated model probably could have figured it out.

The static peeled away, my vision clearing. I was on my back, or at least as much as I could be with my rifle still sitting between my shoulder blades. High above the canopy, the pale light of the planet’s rings blazed and burned my eyes.

My limbs jerked, my fine motor control shot to hell. But the override forced me to move through the aching that ebbed and flowed through my organics from my earlier convulsions. I regained my footing, but every movement was a struggle, my inorganics out of sync with one another.

Next to me, Six was doing the same.

“Oh.”

My head snapped around to face the edge of the gorge.

The woman was alive—somehow. The EMP wouldn’t have hurt her, seeing as she was fully organic, but I had shot her. I know that I had. I had seen the cloud of bloody mist when the hit had landed, and there was nowhere under her gray jumpsuit or oversized coat for her to be hiding any sort of armor. I had watched her fall.

I had thought that her setting off the EMP had been her last act. The heroes in my serials did that, sometimes, performing one final, valiant push when they knew that they were fucked, but still refused to let their deaths be on anyone’s terms but their own.

I had thought that I would reboot to find her corpse draped across the Trash EMP, her death rendered meaningless in the face of our survival.

But she wasn’t dead. She was half crouched behind the Trash EMP, looking worse for wear but still very much alive. And also very much still by the Trash EMP instead of being literally anywhere else, her mouth frozen open in surprise as she sat and stared at us.

It had only been six seconds, but that was a better head start than she’d had seven seconds ago. Why hadn’t she run?

I watched her gaze drop back to the Trash EMP. She fumbled with one hand at the wire lattice and crooked inductor. Her other arm—the right one—stayed pinned at her side, unmoving, the shoulder of her coat soaked through with a dark stain.

Okay. So maybe I had really hit her. I had just missed her head.

She should have been running. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be so lucky as to miss again. She needed to be running.

My arms raised again. The gunport on my right arm whirred, then released a belch of sparks and stayed closed. The gunport on my left arm opened and closed erratically, never staying open long enough for the gun to actually extend from its recess in my forearm.

Next to me, Six seemed to be having problems raising its arms at all.

My organics prickled.

Another wave—an aftershock—hit.

My inorganics spasmed. The synthetic muscles tensed, the joints twisted, the task log jittered and displayed gibberish instead of active subroutines. My systems flickered, tripping into warm reboots behind the override’s wall, falling one by one.

Next to me, Six dropped to one knee, its arms and head twitching as if it was getting shocked.

I braced for a fall, too. I tipped, unsteady on my feet. My organics tensed, my jaw clenching and my hands curling into fists, and—

I stopped.

I flexed my hands.

I didn’t fall.

So, you know how I said earlier that SecUnit design was total crap? I was only 99.9% serious.

Sometime between the discovery of the alien remnants that had originally allowed humans to combine organic bits and inorganic bits to make constructs, and the creation of, well, me, someone figured out that chucking a few EMP grenades at us was a pretty efficient way of taking a lot of us out. That was back when wars were still fought on battlefields instead of on trading room floors, us murderbots were used as soldiers instead of as security, and a construct’s organics were located in its head and nowhere else.

According to the few documentaries that I had watched on the subject—before they had made me too uncomfortable to continue on with them—constructs used to be even stronger and faster than we are now, and they used to be much less organic thanks to all those pesky laws that defined how much cloned tissue was allowed before you had to start doing something stupid like calling constructs people and giving them rights. But none of this meant shit if EMPs could fry a construct and turn them into unfortunate, ugly statues.

It was decided that constructs would need some sort of failsafe—a system of backups, one that could withstand EMP-based attacks. Then murderbots could keep on murdering with their organic components while the more superior inorganic components self-repaired or rebooted in peace.

The Sentinel model was one of the first models to be developed with that thought in mind. Corporate entities lobbied, the line in the sand was moved, and construct organics were increased from a maximum of 10% of total mass to a maximum of 49%. Flesh was added to act as an insulator if temperature controls failed. Eyes that could function even if their optical implants malfunctioned were implemented. Throats and vocal cords were designed to compensate for faulty speech synthesizers. Blood vessels were added to keep all of the new organics healthy, and lungs were stuck in to provide the blood with its needed oxygen.

A majority of the new mass allotment, though, went to the new organic muscle system. It wasn’t a lot of muscle, and the muscle mass was decreased with each successive generation until a minimum threshold for functionality was identified—cloned human muscle is expensive, as it turns out—but it was enough to achieve the desired result.

SecUnits, from the Sentinel line on, were EMP-resistant. Not EMP-proof, because even augmented humans weren’t that, but at least if someone threw an EMP grenade at a SecUnit, it would be able to keep moving.

We could keep moving.

I could keep moving.

I raised my head from where I had been staring at my hands, just curling and uncurling my fingers—

My inorganic systems finished rebooting again. My inorganic muscles pulled, the override using them to rip control from my grasp again.

I tried to pull back, but my organic muscles were just backups for a reason. They were weaker—superior in some ways, yes, but inferior where it really mattered. They were to be used in the absence of my primary inorganics, and were utterly useless otherwise.

They didn’t stand a chance, and all I got for trying to resist with them was more pain.

I lurched forward, the gunport on my left arm still trying—and failing—to open fully. I knew that if I couldn’t use my inbuilt guns to shoot the woman, though, then the override would make me march over there and just break her into pieces manually.

The woman had picked up her interface and dropped it on top of the Trash EMP. Apparently she had caught on to the fact that she had only been shot after it had been moved away from directly in front of her. I thought that maybe she was smarter than I had initially given her credit for—who the hell tries to outrun two SecUnits?—but I tentatively discarded that thought, because she still wasn’t taking advantage of the aftereffects of the pulse to start running.

It was foolish to run, but suicide to stay.

Behind me, Six surged to its feet.

Another aftershock rolled through me, and my systems failed again. I faltered once more, stumbling, my sore organics almost not reacting fast enough to keep me from faceplanting in the dirt.

Six strode past, its own legs shaky. It still seemed to be having issues with moving its arms properly—one was frozen at its side, and the other was making aborted movements at the elbow and wrist like it couldn’t isolate which joint was supposed to do what—but I knew that that wouldn’t stop it, just as my malfunctioning gunports wouldn’t stop me.

I had once seen a SecUnit get its arms ripped off by another SecUnit. The armless Unit had still managed to incapacitate the other one, and then it had proceeded to beat the other Unit’s owner to death with just its helmeted head.

Six did not need its arms to kill the woman.

And, well.

I should probably say that it was a conscious decision. That I had carefully evaluated my options, or that I had been driven by some deeply-held moralistic ideal. All of those require introspection and higher-level thinking, though, and I can’t really say that I had been doing much careful thinking by that point.

All I had known was that I refused to follow blindly if I didn’t have to. And in that particular moment, I didn’t have to, because I had found my leverage.

For however long that it lasted, I had finally found it.

So I dove at Six, grabbed it around its waist, and flipped it into the ground.

It sure hadn’t seen that one coming.

“Flipping it” is being generous, actually. SecUnits are not light, and human muscle isn’t really designed for lifting that. But I did have momentum on my side, and a not insignificant amount of adrenaline, so when I collided with its side, planted my feet, and pulled, Six’s already unstable footing slipped, and down it went.

If my risk assessment module had been working, it probably would have told me that my tactical decision to fist-fight a SecUnit with nothing but organic muscle had around a 100% probability of being really fucking stupid.

Because it was really fucking stupid.

Six grabbed my arms and flipped me in the exact throw that I had been trying to execute when I had tackled it. It was successful where I had failed, though, because it was backed by inorganic muscle.

I hit the ground back-first, and almost immediately seized as my inorganic systems reinstated themselves again. I rolled, rocketing back to my feet, my arms snapping up to point at the woman again.

She was just...staring at me, looking wholly bewildered with whatever the hell was happening.

Yeah, get in line, I was here first.

Six apparently did not hold any grudges against me for my attack, because the moment I was back on my feet and not trying to beat the shit out of it, it looked away and started to climb to its feet again, too.

Then it seized, and fell face-first back into the dirt, one arm pinned under it and the other bent at an awkward angle.

I took three steps towards the woman.

Another aftershock. My inorganic systems went down.

I spun on my heel and threw myself at Six again, jamming my fingers into the gaps of its armor to get enough purchase to try and haul it up.

It rose, but only because it was back online again. It leapt upwards, slamming the top of its helmet into the underside of my chin, snapping my head back and sending my vision spinning.

Okay. Ow.

Six was evidently not willing to forgive me a second time, either. And while it couldn’t control the position of its arms, its gunports were apparently another thing entirely, because the gunport of its right arm opened and fired a round within the same second, directly into whatever its arm was already pointed at.

That just so happened to be a gap between the plates of armor on my upper thigh, right above my left knee.

The round was fired before it had a chance to charge, and my armor did end up catching most of it, but I still felt my organic flesh boiling from the hit. A flood of something warm and wet spilled down my leg and soaked my suit skin.

Okay. Ow.

My systems came back online and didn’t allow me to fall, the override commanding me to ignore the pain even as it did nothing to rectify the pain sensors in that section of my body as they tried to convince me that my leg had surely just been blown off. My circulatory system closed off the compromised veins in my leg, so at least I wasn’t at the immediate threat of losing too many fluids and just dying from that, which would have been very embarrassing.

No, what was much more likely to kill me was Six’s rifle, which it had ripped off of its back. It was struggling to bring it around to bear even as its arms kept trying to twist the wrong way.

I don’t know if Six was planning on using the rifle on me or on the woman. I didn’t care, because at some point, my thoughts had gotten scrambled. They had gone from “I don’t want to do this again,” to “I will not let us do this again.”

When my system had come back online again, I had seen the number in the corner of my vision, flashing in warning.

Our scuffle had brought us across the clearing, towards the gorge.

The barest bones of a plan had taken form, but that was really all I had the time for before another aftershock hit.

Instead of trying to hurl myself at Six again, since that clearly wasn’t working, I dropped my body to the ground. I landed on my side, and kicked out with all of my strength. The soles of my boots collided with Six’s right knee and snapped it sideways. It staggered, still unstable from its own repeated aftershocks.

It tumbled over the edge of the gorge, dropping out of sight.

We had gotten close enough to it during our struggles that I had gotten a better view of the gorge, and the rushing river that ran along the bottom. Its walls were small cliffs, the river below carving into the hills to create steep overhangs that towered five or six meters above the waterline. Any SecUnit, especially one that was in waterlogged armor and still recovering from an EMP, would have a hell of a time trying to scale those cliffs.

And, according to the warning still strobing in the corner of my eye, we were currently 998 meters away from Rat. Another two meters north, and we would cross the boundary that Rat had set for us. At three meters north, a governor module—a functioning one, anyway—would flood its victim’s organics with so much agony that it would wish that it was dead.

At four meters north, it would be.

At the bottom of that cliff, assuming the river hadn’t just swept it away, Six had two options: Follow the cliff southwest for over 300 meters to where the hills evened out and the gorge softened into a regular embankment, or follow the cliff north for seven meters to where part of the overhang had collapsed into a slope leading right down to the water.

Well, with any luck, the river had just carried Six away, and I wouldn’t have to worry about its override commanding it to try, anyway. Or maybe it would just do both of us a favor and drown.

I didn’t get a moment to bask in my victory, though. I seized again, the aftershock fading. The override forced me to my feet once again.

The woman was still fucking there.

She was staring at me still, even as I advanced on her in halting steps. The gunport on my arm finally opened.

Another aftershock. They were getting weaker. Less effective. Further and further apart by milliseconds that felt like years.

I slapped my other hand down on my gunport, manually forcing it closed. The hydraulics, not designed to withstand excessive external force, whined and died in another burst of sparks.

That was a problem to deal with later—assuming that there was a later.

“You—” the woman said, as if trying to strike up a conversation with an unstable murderbot was at all a good idea. “You...fought the other one.”

She was still staring at me.

I hated that.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

I don’t know, I wanted to say, because that was the truth. To buy you time to run. That was the truth, too.

My speech synthesizer was down, so I grit my teeth and forced my mouth to move through the disorientation, through the pain.

“Wh-y wo-n’t y-you ru-n?”

I had never used my organic vocal chords before. It felt weird. It was harder than I thought it would be. It hurt.

Fuck, it hurt.

The woman squinted at me, looking faintly surprised but not outright shocked that I had spoken to her. SecUnits don’t talk to people often, and never to people that are not their contracted clients.

They also usually don’t just haul off and try to murder another SecUnit for seemingly no reason. Maybe she didn’t know anything about SecUnits.

“Who are you with?” the woman asked. “What do you want?”

My inorganics flickered, yanking me forward another few steps, closer to the woman and her very breakable neck.

They died again.

“Ru-un.”

The woman was too close.

The Trash EMP was even closer.

My systems came back online, failed, and came back online again in rapid succession. Before all of my control could be wrested away, though, I dug the fingers of one hand into the gaping wound on my leg on impulse.

Pain like lightning shot down that leg, and some—but notably not all—of my inorganics went down once more.

I couldn’t believe that that worked.

I would have to think about it later, though, because I was out of time. I was always out of time.

I dropped to my knees by the Trash EMP. The woman backed away, kneeling just out of arm’s reach.

If I wanted to get to her, that amount of distance would be nothing.

She still wasn’t running.

Why don’t humans ever just do what they’re told?

“You’re different from the other one,” the woman said. “Different from ours.”

I had always dreaded hearing those words from a human. Some acknowledgement that I was different, that I was other. Some indication that they knew that I was wrong. Uncontrolled. Ungoverned.

At that moment, though, I didn’t feel dread. I didn’t feel much of anything at all, besides drained.

I could really use a recharge cycle.

I reached forward, straining against my reinitializing systems. I pressed on the dislodged inductor, nudging it back into place. I didn’t have anything to resolder it with, so I had to hope that holding it in place would be good enough.

I tilted my head to look at the woman, even if she probably couldn’t tell what I was looking at with my faceplate opaqued.

“Why is this happening?” she asked, her voice dropped low.

Because stupid human bullshit was always happening. No other reason than that, really.

I made my mouth move again.

“Fuck-ing r-run.”

I fumbled with the control panel for all of two seconds before I decided “whatever,” and brought my hand down on the entire thing.

A buzzing burn ran up the arm holding the inductor in place.

The Trash EMP whined.

The woman shouted, I think.

Maybe.

I couldn’t tell, because for the second time that night, my world was whisked away in the wake of an electromagnetic pulse.

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