Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It really wasn’t my fault that my governor module broke. Honest. 

If you want to place the blame on someone, you should blame the stupid planet for making the stupid, terrifying fauna that attacked the survey group and I. I was trying my hardest to keep everyone safe and in the hopper when the creature smashed me in the back of the head with its claws. Usually something like that wouldn’t hurt a SecUnit: we’re built to take hits like that and then get back up even madder, but the force from the hit far exceeded anything a creature of that size could reasonably muster. I could feel something go **Click** in the back of my head a couple microseconds before a searing heat erupted from that same area, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it on account of the horrible monster still bearing down on me. 

Risk assessment was freaking out and a bunch of sub-critical systems had just gone offline, but I managed to roll out of the way of the fauna’s next strike. It left a huge gash in the ground where I had just been. This was getting out of hand: I couldn’t fight this thing and keep track of my clients at the same time. Performance reliability was at 60 percent and falling fast. So I did what any good SecUnit would do and sent an order to the hopper to lift off without me. That way, the clients would be far away from the hostile when it managed to rip my chassis apart. Which wouldn’t take very long, at this rate. 

I managed to get to my feet, and pumped a few rounds from my rifle into the hostile. Each hit landed, but there was no blood spray from the impacts, just small geysers of black smoke, matching its strange and eerie monochrome black body. The only thing that wasn’t black was the angry looking white and red outgrowth on its face. It kind of looked like a gas mask, but in a way that would make my clients probably have to use MedSystem’s trauma evaluation module.

The creature didn’t even flinch. It just kept rushing me down, roaring so loudly I reflexively lowered my audio input volume. That should have been the first clue that something was wrong, but again, more important things to deal with at the moment. I couldn’t dodge in time, and the creature bit me across the torso, it’s alabaster teeth crunching into my frame. Then, to make matters worse, it started smashing me into the ground with its jaws. Each smash threatened to force an emergency shutdown, and the only reason I held onto my rifle was that the grip was magnetized to my fingers. And because I’m a SecUnit, while this is happening I’m still firing rounds into the thing, desperately trying to hit something vital. Whatever counts as vital in this weird, horrible creature that doesn’t fit into any definition of life that my alien fauna data module had on file.

Suddenly (Usually, things like this wouldn’t be a surprise to me because I’m a SecUnit, but my hearing was turned down and I was also being mauled to death, so please forgive me) there was a big crash, and a lot of pain, and then I had an emergency shutdown for real. So that wasn’t great.

“Salutations! Your Iron-Atlaco SecUnit is back online!” Is what my buffer said when I started thinking again. The first thing I saw was the face of one of my clients way too close to my face. She screamed, which wasn’t great: I was trained to know that humans screaming almost always meant that someone was dying, or that I was going to be ordered to make them die. I hadn’t gotten an order like that yet, but I also didn’t want any of my clients to be injured, or worse. Before they could order me to do any of that, I pulled some footage from the hopper to figure out what (The emotions I was feeling would be more accurately described had I used a swear here, but since I hadn’t been taught those yet I’m choosing to omit it. For posterity.) had hit me. And I think that was the point at which any faith I had in humanity’s general competence and intelligence as a species crumbled. One of my clients had overridden my liftoff request and piloted the (another swear here) hopper and crashed it directly into the hostile fauna. 

I was so profoundly stunned at the stupidity of this that I couldn’t speak or react for a whole, real-time second. In this second, the humans were shouting loudly amongst themselves, so I had to rewind the footage to check what they were talking about.

“It’s alive! It’s ok!” said Ms. Rose. She was the resident engineer, and also the one who was leaning over me when I came back online. (Ms. Rose will be important later.) She was right, I was alive, but only barely. Performance reliability was hovering dangerously around 43 percent, and I was intermittently losing connection to my legs. Another human, Ms. Xiao-Long was yelling at Ms. Rose. “Ruby, that was insane!” He said, “You could have killed us all!” 

She was right, of course. What if the hopper had been rendered inoperable? There could have been more hostiles nearby, and the sound would have drawn them near. Or the other humans could have been injured, or a hundred other things could have gone wrong. But apparently, humans have the best luck, because it seems like none of those things had happened. The other two humans, Ms. Belladonna and Ms. Schnee, were at the controls of the hopper. From the camera feed that I had access to, they seemed very shaken.

Ms. Rose walked over to the crew bench where I was laying down on. The crew bench that was not located in the cargo bay that SecUnits are supposed to be stored in. It felt weird to be lying down on something that humans were meant to sit on. They grabbed my hand and turned back to Ms. Xiao-Long, and said, “I had to, Yang. It would have died. It was trying to protect us, and I didn’t want to leave it behind.”

At first, I didn’t understand that she was referring to me. I didn’t remember another human being there, and I was sure the survey equipment they had brought had all gotten trashed. It took me a couple milliseconds to get it, and when I did it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it fried all my logic circuits. Okay, it is, but the point is that I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile that fact with my reality. I was a SecUnit. A piece of equipment. The only difference between a CombatBot and me was some cloned neural tissue I had. If the hostile had actually killed me, the only thing they should have worried about is the fines that Iron-Atlaco would have levied against BeaconSurv. 

Maybe it was the shock of what she had said, or maybe it was just the adrenaline wearing off, but that was the point when I actually started paying attention to all the error codes that were popping up in my systems. There were the obvious ones, about failing structural integrity and critically low operational efficiency, but the one that I was suddenly paying attention to was one I had never seen before. 

Error: No Governor Module Detected. Contact SysAdmin Immediately.

I could have sworn I had one of those. A quick diagnostic confirmed that yes, indeed, I did. Past tense. When I had gotten that big hit from the hostile, it had somehow shifted some crucial bit of wiring around, and looped the governor module into itself. So when the governor detected outside tampering and attempted to fry my systems to prevent me from going rogue, it had ended up frying itself instead. 

Which meant that as of that moment, I was a rogue SecUnit.

My first impulse was to initiate a total shutdown, and, failing that, attempt to put myself out of operation. That was the proper protocol for a SecUnit that has gone rogue. But I couldn’t do that, because Ms. Rose was still holding onto my hand, and the other one wasn’t moving the way I wanted it too.

But if I did that, then who would protect my clients? If this planet was filled with more of those creatures, (I’d like to bring up here that they weren’t mentioned in the survey package, which I’ve included in a separate file) the humans wouldn’t stand a chance. Even I barely stood a chance against one of those things, and I’m a SecUnit. Abandoning them now would mean their certain death.

And maybe, there was something about the way Ms. Rose held my hand and said that she had come back to save me. That made me like her a little bit. Enough to not want her to die a horrible death. I wouldn’t have really been able to say that at the time.

Ms. Schnee called out from the front of the hopper and said that we were getting close to the Hab, which was great for the humans but really bad for me, because the Hab means HubSystem. Part of the SecUnit/HubSystem salutation protocol is an interface with the governor module, which I no longer had. So if I didn’t want to get reduced to scrap, or shot, or something else, I needed to figure out something fast.

Thankfully, I had a lot of things I could do now that there wasn’t a governor module to punish me for trying to do them. Like retrieving the specifications for my own governor module, and putting together a little virtual governor module. Not something that could actually hurt me, but enough so that I could figure out how to respond to HubSys in a way that wouldn’t trip any alarms.

Ms. Rose didn’t let go of my hand until we touched down, and I let her keep holding it. I wasn’t sure why. I was reasonably certain that SecUnits weren’t supposed to hold people’s hands, but I don’t think my governor would have stopped Ms. Rose from initiating it on her end. 

“I need to-” I tried to choose my words carefully, now that I could actually choose them, “go to the Iron-Atlaco SecUnit cubicle.” I was briefly alarmed when Ms. Rose looked at me with a surprised face, but then she said, “Oh my stars, I’m so sorry!” Except when she said it, she said it really fast, so it came out more like “OhmystarsI’msosorry!” 

She let go of my hand, which caused my performance reliability to dip for some reason, but then her hands were fumbling around my shoulders, trying to lift me up. I tried telling her that I could walk on my own, in as many words, but unfortunately my legs were disagreeing with me. 

One of the humans must have sent a request in the feed, because the other half of BeaconSurv came out of the Hab with a rollable desk, which they used as a gurney to cart me over to the cubicle. Usually, clients aren’t supposed to enter a SecUnit’s cubicle, but in cases like these it was obviously unavoidable. On the trip there from the hopper, I could hear their conversations. It was mostly about Ms. Rose, and how worried they were when they got the distress signals, and how stupid and risky she was for using the hopper as a massive blunt weapon. And, of course, that she especially shouldn’t have risked all their lives for the sake of a SecUnit. 

That was the attitude I was trained to expect in these scenarios, so I wasn’t offended or anything (At the time, I didn’t even know to be offended). A funny thing I noticed was that Ms. Schnee, who was Ms. Rose’s romantic partner, kept defending them in all the arguments. Her points probably sounded good to all the humans, but I had the data, and Ms. Rose’s estimated plan of attack had about a 30 percent chance of actually working. I didn’t say that, though. I thought that contradicting a human wasn’t something a non-rogue SecUnit would do.

Eventually, after the long and awkward process of the humans trying to lift me into the repair module, they cleared out of the cubicle. Ms. Rose and Ms. Schnee were the last to go, and they stopped to look back at me. Ms. Rose gave a little wave and smiled. 

And then, for the first time in my life, I was alone, and free. And, beyond keeping these humans alive, I had no idea what to do.

Chapter Text

Well, ok. I had some idea of what to do. I crept into the feed and accessed Ms. Belladonna’s workspace, sifting through her files until I could find what I was looking for. I found it pretty quickly: A nice, well organized codebase document. It’s basically the most barebones way for a human to learn how to code. Cyberwarfare modules exist for SecUnits, but only for CombatUnits. If I was a CombatUnit, I probably could have beaten that fauna from earlier.

Regardless, the codebase document was really useful for me, even though it wasn’t a fancy module. The way humans and SecUnits absorb and process information is very different, so while a human might be forced to take a rest period if they tried to read the codebase, I can digest the whole thing in seconds. Immediately, I realized a bunch of things, mostly about the horrible slapdash attempts at coding from before. What I called a “virtual governor module” was barely more than a couple of canned handshakes. It was a miracle HubSys hadn’t found me out earlier. My first task was fixing that before it got me killed.

While I was doing that, the humans were having a “what the heck is going on and are we all about to die” meeting. I was paying attention to that too over the cameras, because I can focus on multiple things at once pretty easily.

The members of BeaconSurv that were on the hopper earlier were sitting on one of the futons in the lounge. Ms. Nikos was pacing around the habitat, while the others were sitting at a table nearby. Ms. Rose had already filled the other four in on what had happened on the expedition, specifically, the horrible fauna that almost killed everyone.

“So there are hostile fauna?” Ms. Nikos said, “The survey package was wrong, and there are hostile fauna?” She said it twice, but I got the sense that she believed that saying it another time might somehow change the situation. She was displaying all the signs of acute stress that my analysis module had recorded: creased brows, increased sweat output, and general agitation.

“In the event of any false survey package data, especially something that puts us in danger, the contract specifies that we activate the distress beacon.” Mx. Lie says. Xey was right, but I also just wanted the humans to get as far away from this weird planet as possible, whatever the contract might say. Even though leaving the planet meant meeting my company again, which I still had no idea what to do about, the best option for everyone was to get the heck out of here and never look back.

Ms. Valkyrie made everyone in the room jump when she slammed her fist into the table. “Those fuckers lied to us! And after all we paid them too! Weiss, we gotta get our money back.” 

“I, well,” Ms. Schnee said awkwardly. “I don’t have much hope for that, honestly. Iron-Atlaco tends to fight things like this, and on top of the issue of strange synthetic licensing, they might be able to stall us out in court.”

“What!” Ms. Valkyrie yelled, but now Ms. Xiao-Long was yelling too. Everybody was looking towards Ms. Schnee. 

“I put everything I took from my father into this. Unless any of you have some currency lying around, I don’t know how we’d afford lawyers. …I’m sorry.” She said, her voice trembling.

Another human, Mr. Arc, whimpered from the side of the room. “I took out a loan for this,” he said. “They’re going to make me go into indenture to pay it off. And my whole family too, probably.”

My modules started blaring at me. This was the sort of situation where humans would start screaming and hurting each other, and my virtual governor module wanted me to go there and stop it. I was just about to agree with it, no matter that I was barely repaired enough to stand, when Ms. Rose stood up. 

She was the shortest out of all of the humans, standing almost a full head under Ms. Nikos, but for a second, she seemed to tower over all of them. I was in another room entirely, and I still felt something weird. 

“Guys,” she said, and everyone looked toward her, “We aren’t going to fail, and no one’s going to have to go into indenture, because we aren’t going to leave the planet.” 

Everyone turned toward her with wide eyes, and then they all started saying things at once, like “You can’t be serious!”, “That’s stupid as hell!”, and “Hah! That’s my little sister.”

Unfortunately, she was serious, and it was stupid as hell.

“Hey!” Ms. Rose shouted over everyone, silencing them. “I mean, just think about how far we’ve come. Everyone said that we wouldn’t be able to incorporate ourselves without a parent company, but we did. Everyone said we wouldn’t get licensed to deal with strange synthetics, but we did. Why should we let some weird, gross fauna stop us now! We have everything we need to survive. Not just survive, but kick that monster’s butt!”

Ms. Xiao-Long cheered. Some of the others chuckled, and some of them groaned. I was part of the groaning team, even though no one was counting me. This was beyond dangerous. Suicidal, even. If my governor module was still active, I would have reported them all for breach of contract. It wasn’t, though, so, you know. I didn’t.

Ms. Nikos put her hand on Ms. Rose’s shoulder. My readings said that the stress she was displaying earlier had almost completely disappeared. “I agree with Ruby,” she said, “We can split up our efforts to fortify the habitat and develop countermeasures against the fauna. Jaune, Yang, and Nora, see if you can shore up our defenses with the SecUnit. Blake, Weiss, and Ruby should use JinnSys. See if you can whip something up that will put a dent in the creatures. Then Ren and I will try and continue our research. Does that sound like a plan?”

No. It didn’t. It was a terrible plan. But no one listened to me (mostly because I didn’t tell anyone that.) The humans all liked it though, because they were stupid. Like, the type of stupid that makes you crash a hopper into a giant monster on purpose. I was still taking a little look through their systems with my newfound top coding skills, (I didn’t mean to snoop, but I hadn’t had a chance to learn about “privacy” yet,) and took the chance to learn a little bit more about the idiotic humans I needed to protect. 

Turns out, they were a lot more than a survey group. They were a whole company, technically. Like, they were the owners and also the only employees. Yes. I know. Well, Ms. Schnee was listed as the owner, and Ms. Rose and Ms. Nikos were listed as supervisors, but they didn’t act like my modules said owners and supervisors were supposed to act. They didn’t order people to do things they didn’t want to do, and they didn’t make me enforce those orders. Trawling through past video footage, I even saw them do what their “subordinates” told them to, like it was normal. It was weird. 

What was also weird was what they were even doing on this stupid planet. They weren’t just doing a survey, they were actively trying to build a facility. I remembered some of the equipment that they were using to do it, but before my governor module broke I didn’t really have the prerogative to think about why they had it. Now I did.

They had it, they were here, because they wanted to mess around with strange synthetics (read: alien stuff). The only thing my modules said about alien stuff was to run very fast in the other direction. Which made the whole thing with staying on the planet even worse. 

(Insert expletive here.)

After a recharge cycle, I was back at around 97 percent operational capacity, and I was about to head over to where Ms. Xiao-Long and Ms. Valkyrie were when I was stopped by Ms. Schnee in the hallway.

“SecUnit,” she said, “Could I please speak with you for a moment?” For a moment I thought she had found me out. Why else would she be asking me for something instead of ordering me around? It took me a quarter of a second to remember that humans tend to phrase things as questions to be polite sometimes. My modules didn’t tell me how to be polite. They told me how to shoot people, so I didn’t really have any clue about this “communication” thing yet.

She must have taken my silence for something affirmative, because she started talking again. “I’ve interacted with SecUnits before. Mostly the ones my father owned. I thought of your kind as tools, or weapons at worst. But… I know what you’re made out of. I know that you’re probably a person. It may not have been entirely your choice, but you saved my life yesterday.”

I didn’t know what she was referring to, so I had to review the footage from the fight with the fauna. It was right before my governor module broke. Ms. Schnee had tripped over something trying to back away from the monster, so I had to pick her up bodily and chuck her away as far as I could. I couldn’t recover fast enough, and that was when the monster hit me, and broke the governor module. Huh.

Ms. Schnee had continued talking, so I rewound the footage to catch up on the conversation. “It may not mean much, but thank you. Thank you for saving me.”

That was. That was weird. I was feeling weird things. My performance reliability was spiking all over the place, sometimes going past 100 percent for some reason. This was not something any of the company training had prepared me for.