Archive of Our Own ^beta

I said no. Multiple times. I'm sure I did. Yet somehow I ended up on Preservation for this festival celebrating some combination of a) a planetary season, I don't remember which one, it's not like I keep track, b) something to do with growing plants for food, I don't eat so I don't care, and c) everyone not dying when they first arrived on the planet.

(I know which one of these sounds like the most important to me, but humans aren't rational about things like that, and I got the impression that which one(s) of these is/are the actual thing the holiday is all about depends on who's telling you about it while you try not to listen. I think there was also something in there about incorporating customs from a previous human festival that was celebrated in one of the cultures the original colonists came from, or whatever.)

Honestly, while the idea of hanging around with a bunch of partying humans sounds like less fun than having my limbs removed one by one in an industrial press, the part of it where I'd be spending time with my humans and watching my humans have fun actually sounded kind of nice. (Don't tell anyone.)

The main thing, though, is that I prefer to have as little to do with human celebrations as possible, for two reasons.

1. In the serials, holidays and celebrations usually are either boring filler episodes about humans furthering their romantic relationships and sticking tongues into each other's mouths (ugh), or important season arc episodes in which people get kidnapped, collapse suddenly from the illness they've been hiding for half the season, or the whole affair gets attacked by aliens or an opposing corporate polity. I enjoy most of that plot arc stuff in fiction, but it's 100% not fun in real life. Ask me how I know.

2. I realize serials aren't usually based on real events, so their accuracy is variable, but my general experience of human holidays while I was a governor-module-controlled murderbot was that they actually are kind of like that, but without all the interesting parts and with a lot more screaming, intoxication, and fights.

Preservation holidays were probably not as distressing as the Corporation Rim kind and almost certainly less exciting than the serial kind, but I looked up pictures of the one that my humans wanted me to go to, and it looked like everything I was dreading, minus the aliens and the fights.

The holiday was called Preservation Harvest Days, and it happened every iteration of some planetary seasonal time unit, I didn't really pay attention, and was one of the big holidays of their year. Ratthi was the one who first mentioned it to me, and then it started coming up in conversation every time two or more of my humans were in a room together, talking about foods and costumes and decorations, none of which raised my percentage chances of going any more than they already were. (Percentage chance: 2.3%. This went up to 19.7% if Dr. Mensah had decided to ask me directly to come, which hadn't happened, although she had mentioned to me a few times that I'd be welcome.)

(For comparison's sake, I usually estimate Preservation's chances of being attacked by aliens or corporate polities around 4-7% at any given time, and the chances of the station losing air and gravity due to an unforeseen disaster around 2-4%.)

(I didn't actually wish that either of these things would happen during the harvest holiday because I'm the one who would mostly have to deal with it, and also, my humans might be in danger, so no. But I thought about it.)

Anyway, the thing that made me decide to go after all was when the decorations started appearing, like stealthy Murderbot repellent, all over Preservation Station -- orange round things, creepy person-shaped straw things, sparkly lights, the physical printed-out equivalent of feed ads for parties, humans hand-sewing costumes in the public spaces, etc -- and I realized that I would have to deal with it on the station as well. I could just shut myself in my room for a week and watch media, which was tempting. But nearly all my humans were down on the planet (the exception being Pin-Lee, who was working on some kind of legal project that was important enough to work through the holiday), and with the communications lag, and ART out of the system, there wasn't anybody to talk to in realtime. When that became a thing I liked having, I didn't know, but apparently it was enough to make me go endure Harvest Days on Preservation.

Ugh.

***

I was staying at Mensah's home, which wasn't generally too bad, as shared human residences go. Her offspring and partners and relatives knew me, and they knew that usually I liked to stay in a guest room and come out only when I felt like it. In this case, though, there was a problem, which was that since I didn't tell Mensah I was thinking about coming until 1.3 days before the holiday, the house was already full of humans visiting from other parts of the Preservation Alliance. Most of them had brought offspring. Great.

Mensah made an offer to move everyone out of one of the rooms so I could have my own -- actually what she said was that I could use the room that she and her partners normally shared, and they would share with others, which I had to process for a full 5.9 seconds of absolute horror because no, for a number of reasons.

"What about the agricultural bot storage shed?" I said.

The humans argued about this for a while, for some reason, but it sounded like a perfect solution to me. I was thinking I could just stand in a corner or whatever -- I mean, yeah, now that I've gotten used to having human-style accommodations, I appreciate the benefits of having beds and chairs and display screens, but I don't need them the way humans do, and being in the shed sounded like a great way to avoid all the holiday stuff unless I wanted to engage with it. However, I got there to find that Mensah and her family had set up a corner of the shed so that it approximated a human residential area within the larger, cargo-bay-like equipment storage space. They had dragged an old couch out there, and set up a portable display screen, and there was a lamp and a small table to put things on and some of the kids' drawings had been put up on the walls. It looked incredibly .... cozy, I guess, and because it was out of the main human living space, it didn't even have all the smells and sounds of habitation spaces shared between humans; it smelled like machine oil and inorganics, and it was very quiet when the door was closed.

Okay, so I had a few feelings about this.

"Can I stay here every time I come to stay with you?" I asked Mensah after the rest of the family (and Ratthi and Bharadwaj, who seemed to be staying with them as well) all had their opportunity to say hi to me and were gently but firmly herded out by Mensah.

Her face did a complicated expression, but I was getting better at reading faces of real, non-entertainment humans, especially hers, and I thought she looked more amused than upset. (Wry? Is that an emotion?) "Yes, of course," she said. "Actually, while we will probably need to use some of these things when you're not here --" Valid, everything on Preservation gets used by everybody unless it's a personal item, that's just kind of how they are. "-- if you want this to be your space, it can be. Permanently, I mean. We can leave it set up for you."

I had a few feelings about that, too. Luckily she left so I could have them in private.

There were a lot of reasons why Mensah was my favorite human. I had to decompress with a few favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon to stop thinking about it.

***

Once I had my organics working normally again, or at least within tolerable parameters, I stayed in my (???!!!) space on Mensah's farm and watched holiday episodes of various serials for research. I sorted them into categories.

1. Boring relationship episodes. Skippable.

2. Exciting plot episodes. Lots of things happening. Someone usually gets hurt or dies, which normally when I was watching a serial I would find interesting (mostly because I had a lot to critique about their security arrangements, which were almost always terrible), but as far as research for Preservation's celebration, it felt unusually distressing to me this time.

3. Funny episodes. Often overlapped with the relationship episodes, but at least there was something more interesting going on than nonstop focus on human mating rituals.

Category (3) actually seemed to be the ones with the most information on how humans dealt with their cultural holidays, mostly in terms of things going wrong, but lightly funny things rather than "oh no, six heavily armed humans in power armor just broke through the wall of our habitat while we are trying to exchange culturally significant gifts." A common plotline was one of the characters deciding to avoid the holiday and then seeing the error of their ways and joining the festival later with their other human friends, and hahaha, humans, if that's what you think my role in this festival is going to be, you will soon see the error of your ways. I was coming out of this equipment shed when I felt like it. Possibly never.

(The fact that I was here to begin with suggested that I might be engaged in some real-life version of this plot already, which caused a notable dip in my performance reliability. Fuck.)

It wasn't what my threat assessment module was meant for, but as it provided most of the underlying code for my patchwork of human behavior analysis hacks, I slapped together a few extra pieces of code and tried running it on the holiday episodes to analyze what benefits humans generally got out of these activities. I left the action scenes out of this analysis because I was hoping nothing violent was going to happen on Preservation, and if it did, its biggest problem would be me.

The results were not a huge surprise. Result #2 was furthering of romantic or reproductive aspirations (urgh). But results #1 and #3 were at least slightly less objectionable.

1. Bonding socially to other members of the team, crew, or friend group.

3. Repairing personal wounds caused by childhood tragedy or lack of affection. (Obviously not how it works for constructs.)

Other results included: receiving satisfying, personally meaningful gifts (not even touching that one), healing a rift with a crewmate or friend from earlier in the episode (not applicable to me in this case, at least that I knew of), having an epiphany about the future direction of one's life (not impossible, but I hoped not), and creating a pleasant holiday experience for the small humans in the group.

This one came in dead last in my analysis because I didn't tend to watch a lot of media with small humans -- I was more a fan of exciting serials with a lot of twists and interpersonal drama, not the sort that tended to focus on child caretaking -- but from the amount of high-pitched squealing that had been going on outside my equipment shed during the day or so I had been watching and analyzing media, almost dominating the other sounds of music and laughter (backed up by drone footage of more than just Mensah's large number of offspring), this was probably a key feature of Preservation holidays. It just figured that one of the things that mattered the most to them was the thing I had the least data on. (Well, okay, social bonding was probably .... fine. I could participate in that. Sort of.)

The idea of staying in my equipment shed for the entire holiday had occurred to me. It was comfortable, private, and I had experienced almost no incursions except a) one of Mensah's partners coming in to fetch something from the tool racks with a cheerful "Hi, SecUnit" that I didn't seem to be obligated to respond to, and b) Amena coming in to say hi and chat with me about a project she was doing for school, which I found that I didn't mind at all, to my surprise. I'd also received taps in the feed from nearly all my humans, a bot-style ping from Gurathin that my buffer returned in kind (yeah I don't know either, it's just what we do, I guess), and a chatty message from Ratthi laden with cheerful glyphs; basically just letting me know they were there and, in Ratthi's case, how things were going. Which I already knew because I was keeping an eye on events outside the equipment shed with my drones, but I also had some emotions about all of them taking a minute to check in with me.

Observing with my drones made me feel like I was there without actually being there. I saw that the whole house and the grounds were decorated, they had bonfires going, and music which was a mix of recordings played out loud on the household system, and actual music being made by an ever-changing mix of humans with instruments.

I could have done this from the station, though, just picking up the drone footage in packets because of the station-to-planet delays. I could have stayed in my room on the station, too.

But eventually, even though I was working myself up to it, what got me to come out was Arada tapping me in the feed. Hey, Overse & me & Ratthi are taking the kids trick or treating in FirstLanding. You want to come?

I searched "trick or treating," which hadn't been in any of my shows, and got conflicting results. Does this require security?

No, we just thought you might have fun. That was Ratthi, and great, this was a group chat now.

Fun? Doubtful. And yet. Okay, I said. I mean, I had been thinking about coming out of the agbot shed anyway.

Really? Non-augmented humans don't typically broadcast feelings into the feed, but Ratthi usually managed to do it anyway with liberal use of sigils, which I was deleting from this conversation because I felt like it. Wow! That's great, mate. You don't have to wear a costume.

A WHAT now. I really hope not, I said.

***

It was early evening, the sky deepening to bruised-looking colors above us. Most of Mensah's group of humans were out in the fields at the bonfires. Smoke and food smells drifted past us. Ratthi arrived on one of the small electric vehicles that were common on Preservation for getting around between the outlying farms and the towns that were too far-flung to be on the train system. At least, I knew it was Ratthi because of his biometrics and because I had watched through a drone in increasing disbelief and horror as he put on whatever it was that he was wearing.

I was not going to ask.

"Check it out, huh? It's a character from a kid's show. Mensah's kids helped me make it."

"Okay," I said, looking at the bobbing crest thing on top of his head. The closest thing in my database to whatever he was supposed to be was a domestic avian fauna of some sort.

To my vast relief, Overse and Arada were not wearing costumes, or at least Overse didn't seem to be, though I gradually realized that Arada didn't usually wear skirts that long and she had done something with her hair, so probably she was supposed to be something too, but I didn't ask and she didn't volunteer. The small humans, of which there were eight, were all dressed up, but at least their costumes were mostly very simple. Two were draped in sheets, one was supposed to be one of the orange gourd things, one was some kind of fauna ... and I didn't care enough to figure out the rest.

Everyone crammed into the vehicle, probably about twice as many people as it was rated for, but nobody seemed to think this was unusual, even Overse and Arada, who I'd thought had more sense than this. I spent my time on the ride to First Landing running threat assessment scenarios for all of the many ways this could go wrong: individual scenarios for each of the kids falling off, scenarios for the adults falling off, what if a fauna jumped in front of us, what if the vehicle had a mechanical failure, what if corporates attacked right now, etc.

But we made it to the city without problems, left the vehicle in one of the shared lots (they were communally owned; to get back we would need to use another or find someone going our way) and proceeded with the trick or treat part of the evening. It was -- okay? I figured out the rules pretty quickly, the kids had fun, the adult part was mostly just walking around in their general vicinity and waving to other adults shepherding their own herds of kids (or largely ignoring them while scanning for threats, in my case). Arada and Overse and Ratthi chatted with each other, and Ratthi engaged me in conversation about the latest season of Sanctuary Moon. He was completely wrong about everything on the show, as usual, but it was a friendly, unobjectionable kind of wrong.

The trick or treating went on until the kids were getting tired and their baskets were half full of the various things that strange adults had given them -- fruit, small toys, treats, that kind of thing. I quietly used my drones to scan the baskets for anything dangerous or toxic.

"Babe and I are spending the night in FirstLanding with the kids at my mom's place," Arada told me. "Do you want to --" She stopped. My horror at the idea of being trapped in a strange residence with a bunch of mostly-strangers and offspring might have shown. "Ratthi, you were going back tonight, weren't you?"

"Uh, yeah," Ratthi said. "You want a ride, SecUnit?"

He took off the costume before we left, leaving it at Arada's parent's house. We rode back on a different vehicle than we had come on, a small electric scooter that accommodated two adult-sized persons only with difficulty. With the costume, there would not have been a chance of fitting us both on. Also, we would have looked ridiculous, but I didn't think he cared about that in particular.

There was no bot pilot, just a pilot assist on this thing, which seemed highly unsafe to me, but Ratthi drove and I rode behind him. He chatted the whole way -- about Sanctuary Moon, about the festival, about his family -- and I made listening noises and thought about pulling up a show .... but I didn't really want to. I wasn't used to being on planets at night, especially with nowhere to patrol and nothing to do except look around. The air was cool, seasoned with smoke. The great dark sweep of farmland was dotted with bonfires and the lights of small family farms like Mensah's. The stars were bright overhead. I found myself wanting to record the experience. I saved a clip to permanent storage with as much of the sensory data as I was able to include.

Back at the farm, some of the humans were in bed (I knew by my drone footage that Bharadwaj was one of them, as well as some guests who were acclimatized to a different day-night cycle on another part of the planet) but most were still up. Ratthi immediately gravitated towards his latest romantic interest, at which point I noped out. I thought about going back to my shed, but instead, I went into the field where nearly everyone who was still up was at the bonfires. I found Mensah there, and Amena, and they both said hi to me. Amena was with a group of other medium-sized small humans from surrounding farms, and they went off together. Mensah was with her spouses.

I had no idea exactly what to do at a gathering when I didn't eat or drink or particularly want to talk to anyone.

Which left me drifting aimlessly around the edges of the gathering as humans ate foods and talked to each other and (inevitably) snuggled in various romantic situations around the fire, which was exactly what I had been trying to avoid this whole time.

Eventually I was forced to either stand by myself under a tree watching media (not a bad choice) or -- there was no helping it -- wander towards the only other person at the gathering who was also not pursuing romantic affection or really talking to people much: Gurathin, obviously. I wasn't sure exactly when he had arrived, because I hadn't been paying attention, but he was at the very edge of the circle of firelight with a cup of some kind of drink in his hand.

I pinged him. He pinged back, and then when I was closer, he said, "I heard you helped take the kids trick or treating earlier. You can say no if you want, you know."

"Have you ever noticed me having any particular problem saying no to anything?"

"Good point." He glanced at me, up and down, although he only looked at my face for 0.3 seconds before he remembered to look away. "Is that your costume?"

"Yes. I'm disguised as a terrifying murderous rogue SecUnit."

I wasn't looking at his face, but my drones informed me that one side of Gurathin's mouth curled up in one of his little smiles. "It's not very convincing."

Asshole. "What's your costume?"

He made a little gesture to himself. "I'm dressed as an ordinary human."

"It's not very convincing."

Again the slight smile. "What do you think of the festival?"

"It's ...." Weird. Different. Kind of fun. ".... fine."

"Yeah," he said, looking towards the bonfire. "It took me a while to get used to things like this."

Right, talking about feelings with Gurathin was definitely not how this evening was going to end. I had already started to walk away when he said in the feed, Do you know that on some planets, one of the customs at harvest festivals like this one is watching scary media?

WHAT. I stopped. Wait, there's a media component to this holiday and no one told me?!

I felt his amusement bleed into the feed. Asshole. It's not that much of a thing on Preservation, but it's definitely a custom in some places. It was where I -- Brief pause. Do you want me to send you some recommendations?

I wrestled with myself for 1.2 seconds. Yeah, sure.

I was expecting a list or something. What I was not expecting was him to drop part of his firewall and let me into an area of his private storage on his augments. (Which was not nearly as large as my storage, of course, but -- was this media in here? WHAT.)

You've been holding out on me! I told him.

Amusement. I don't think most of it is your kind of thing. You like shows like Sanctuary Moon. I like horror and documentaries. But feel free to take anything you want.

Well, the documentaries could simply be ignored -- okay, most of them; I snagged a couple on terraforming so I could understand a little more of what Mensah did. I ran a quick analysis on the rest of his media, checked a couple of catalogue sites. Most of it I'd never heard of. Lots of low-budget stuff from small polities, only a few shows I'd seen on the big download feeds. Wow.

You watch this for fun? I said as I examined the directory, with titles like They Came From the Zombie Death Moon: The Sequel and RoboSlasher 9 and Giant Crabs! in the Basement! Gurathin was never getting to poke fun at my media ever again.

Yes.

Weirdo.

I decided to copy the entire directory's contents to some of my unused storage. ART might be interested in some of this, out of curiosity if nothing else, as long as nothing terrible happened to any ships in it; I'd have to review it beforehand. I had a feeling I wouldn't want to watch most of it, because a cast of humans getting messily killed in novel ways was too much like my job (or more accurately, the worst failure mode of my job). But it was a whole entire type of media I'd never really watched any of, and I was reluctantly intrigued.

I became aware of something happening in the directory. He was adding red flags to some of the titles. I sent ?.

These are the ones with rogue SecUnits in them. He sounded -- apologetic? They're a pretty common baddie in this kind of thing. I didn't really think about it; sorry.

Not played by actual SecUnits?

No, of course not. They're humans with pieces of metal taped to them, mostly.

Oh, that. SecUnits were pretty common as villains in the types of media I watched as well. The human idea of what SecUnits looked like under their armor was so stupidly unrealistic that it was pretty easy to ignore. Not that I was going to explain all of that. That's okay. But, uh. He had finished annotating the directory. It reminded me of how I went through media beforehand for ART and tagged the ones with bad things happening to ships or their crews. .... I'm going to go see if there's anything good in here.

Have fun.

I had finished copying, and closed the connection more obviously than I usually would have, so that he could tell I was out of there and *restore your stupid firewalls, dumbass.* Which I felt him doing behind me. I quietly added a couple of patches for outdated bits of code, as a public service just in case some other asshole, who wasn't me, felt like trying to wander around in there. Humans and augmented humans are so careless about their security.

With a whole directory of new media to explore and a cozy piece of soft furniture to do it on, I wasn't that enthusiastic about continuing to associate with humans. But I found Mensah first and told her I was going back to the agbot shed.

"Okay, SecUnit. Thank you for letting me know." She was sprawled in a low portable chair, hand in hand with a sleepy-looking Tano, with a drink in her other hand. She looked sleepy and soft and open in a way I almost never saw her. Which of course made me think that leaving her like that -- soft, unguarded, slightly intoxicated -- without a SecUnit to protect her was a terrible idea.

"Or I could stay," I said.

She waved the hand containing her drink at me. "I'm sure your drones will be keeping an eye on the entire farm. We'll all be fine. But thank you for worrying."

Because of course she knew exactly why I was hesitating. I didn't know how to feel about being known like that. It would have been deeply uncomfortable with anyone else. But instead I felt kind of warm. And, okay, a little uncomfortable. But not in a wholly unpleasant way.

"Good night, SecUnit," said Tano.

"Uh ... good night," I said to both of them, and went hastily back to my agbot shed with my directory full of new media.

I got comfortable on the couch, started sorting Gurathin's (mostly awful, consider the source) media by my level of interest and its likelihood of appealing to ART, and started my drones on a regular patrol pattern around the perimeter of the farm, as well as setting up a rotation of check-ins with their cameras and hastily writing some lines of code to automatically scan for hostiles. (Rogue fauna. Enemy SecUnits. The usual stuff.)

It was oddly -- comfortable. I could hear the humans chatting with each other through my drones. Most of my humans were sleeping or elsewhere. I checked in with the drone monitoring Arada and Overse in FirstLanding. All was well; they were asleep. Amena and her friends had gone back to the farm habitat, where some of them were asleep, although Amena and a couple of others had stayed up in Amena's room in their sleep clothes, talking and giggling. Ratthi and his partner were -- okay, you know what, backburning that feed immediately. Gurathin had stopped lurking around the edges of the firelight like a stray fauna, now that most of the other humans had gone to bed, and was sitting by the fire with Mensah and Tano.

I picked one of the more interesting-looking shows from Gurathin's media folder, a serial called Terror on Spider Planet!, and started it playing.

... Ugh. This was actually good. I mean, the budget wasn't even a fraction of the shows I typically liked to watch, which were mostly CR productions. The spiders were obviously plastic models on strings. But there was also some pretty interesting stuff going on with the human characters, and a mystery about the origin of the alien space spiders that I was reluctantly invested in. And the humans looked more like ordinary humans than most humans I had seen in media, which was simultaneously interesting and kind of weird.

ART might like this. I tagged it with the #forart tag, ran through my drone checks again, also started a drone on a search pattern around the agbot shed to check for spiders (look, you never know), and settled back to watch.