Chapter Text
So maybe I should’ve noticed I had bullshit magic powers sooner, but in my defense I didn’t think magic was real. Most sane people would insist magic isn’t real.
Wait, whoops, the ghosts would claim it’s not magic. It’s “the Force” (in case you’re wondering, yes, you can hear the capitalization), and I’m a “Force-sensitive” which means I’m able to manipulate the mysterious, supernatural (but definitely not magical) force that a bunch of old dead monks decided to name the Force. (Not that I’m making fun of their naming sense. It’s apt even if it must’ve gotten confusing sometimes.)
According to those dead monks, you have to be born Force-sensitive. You either are or you aren’t. There’s no way for anyone to become Force-sensitive unless you’re in some weird magic area (and that’s temporary) or you’ve been put through a bunch of “evil Sith” experiments. I wasn’t born and I don’t think the company would’ve experimented on the horrifying murderbot to give it the power to strangle people with its mind on purpose. SecUnits are already deadly enough. Giving us supernatural powers straight out of a fantasy serial is such overkill it almost wraps around the edge of awful absurdity right into being hilarious.
I don’t know how or why I’m Force-sensitive. The best guess so far is that it’s my genetic donor’s fault since Force-sensitivity is supposedly heritable. (But if there’s a gene for it, I haven’t found it yet.)
This means I’ve been Force-sensitive (ugh, that’s such a mouthful, the ghosts can fuck off, I’m calling it magic) my whole life. Even if I’ve had my memory wiped, that was years ago. Seems like plenty of time for me to notice something was weird. So now you might be wondering again, “Wow, is this asshole stupid or what?” You’d be right to think that except symptoms only started manifesting about a year ago. Before that I just got bad feelings about things (not a very convincing symptom of having magic powers, even if they did always turn out to be right) and I guess I might’ve had prophetic dreams about the murder on Preservation Station and the assassination attempt on Mensah (which also took place on Preservation Station, but the murdered human was a human smuggler named Lutran, not Mensah)?
This is a guess because if I did have those dreams, I don’t remember them. I didn’t even realize I’d dream like a human when I was shut down back then. (Sleeping and dreaming is optional during a recharge cycle. I usually choose to these days because unfortunately organic neural tissue benefits from getting sleep.) I just know I got that particular feeling you get when you encounter something the organic brain kept despite a memory wipe. At the time I assumed they were memory ghosts. I’ve seen a lot of murdered humans. One of them might’ve looked like Lutran. I don’t know if I’d ever stopped an assassination attempt before the wipe. It seems more likely that I would’ve been the one doing the assassinating, but who knows. Maybe the memory ghost was just of a regular everyday murder attempt. Or maybe I had prophetic dreams I didn’t remember, making them useless.
Oh, I guess the precognition might’ve also tipped me off about the core cutter when I was escaping Milu? It was convenient that I looked back before going for Wilken and Gerth’s weapons. If I’d been any slower on that, Miki might’ve died. But this is all useless speculation. I can never know for sure.
The point is that it all really started with weird dreams. I won’t get into all the boring details. None of them did anything except surprise me with my brain’s creativity (and consistency, since dreams are an organic thing so I figured the lore should’ve been messier) until the avalanche.
I came out of my recharge cycle to ART getting all up in my business in the feed. I was getting strange feelings from it, but I couldn’t care at the moment. You were having a nightmare, it informed me.
The impressions of a deafening crack of ice, a desperate race against a roaring torrent of snow, Bharadwaj’s panicked face, and Gurathin’s cold unconscious body were already starting to fade, slipping away without being written to my inorganic memory. I was still disturbed though. The tension of my dream self lingered even though I was safe and warm in my cozy bunk, wrapped up in fluffy blankets.
No shit, I said. My act-like-a-human code made my body shiver as I curled up into a tighter ball until I was almost in a SecUnit Transport Ball™, some part of me apparently still convinced that I was freezing and losing power fast.
ART squashed me in the feed. You are safe aboard me. There are no threats here, it said like I didn’t already know. It nudged the inputs for its interior cameras at me, and I couldn’t stop myself from compulsively flicking through them, just to double check that our humans were okay. It was stupid. The dream hadn’t even been about the crew. It’d been about my Preservation humans. But it made me feel better anyway to see them peacefully asleep.
The stress toxins started making their way out of my system, and I relaxed into a looser sprawl. It hadn’t been that bad of a dream in the grand scheme of things. I was pretty sure no one had died. Yeah, two of my humans and I had wound up trapped in the dream-habitat with hypothermia setting in, but on my personal scale of catastrophes it was on the lower end, maybe a 3 or 4. (If you’re curious, Adamantine still topped out at 10 on the “oh shit we’re so fucked” scale.)
I think not too long ago I would’ve been embarrassed I got so worked up over it. But it turns out the trauma treatment has been good for something, so mostly I was just annoyed at my brain for making that dream so vivid and realistic.
I could feel ART’s curiosity poking through the confusing jumble of everything else wafting off it now that I’d calmed down. What did you dream of? it asked. Nosy asshole.
I could refuse to say shit and it’d respect that. So I threw my queries about avalanche detection/monitoring and response/rescue procedures into our shared workspace. I went ahead with running searches and compiling data from its banks in the millisecond it took to process before it started helping me. I complained, What was dream-me doing? It should’ve seen the avalanche coming. I ignored the fact that I’d never had to deal with the threat of avalanches before (turns out areas where there’s that much snow aren’t popular for mining or surveys or...much of anything), and actually this dream had given me a whole new planetary anxiety to worry about. Thanks for nothing, brain.
Oh yeah, also it was a dream? Why was I complaining about dream logic. My dream-self made no choices?
Because ART is an asshole, it pointed out, You’re not rated for freezing temperatures. You’ve never had to think of it before. Yeah, there was the other reason I’d never been sent to cold ass places before. What with me being a cheap general purpose rental unit, the company hadn’t shelled out for the extra insulation and freeze-resistant power core that more expensive, cold-rated units have. And why bother wasting money on bundling a SecUnit up in thermal clothes like a human if you’re in a cold climate when you can just rent one built for the cold? You’re so talented, ART added with 50% more sarcasm than usual.
The words would’ve been shocking (“You’re so talented”?? What the fuck???) if it weren’t for the tone. Wait, no, it was shocking anyway. What the fuck.
I couldn’t understand how that non-sequitur (the most recent Word of the Day Three told me about, when I last saw it) had anything to do with anything. I sent, Query: diagnostic? with as much “what the actual fuck are you on about” feeling as I could push into the feed. I guess maybe for a human, it’d be like if I asked, “Are you having a fucking stroke?”
ART did the feed equivalent of a sigh and eye roll. It still felt…weird. You have no reason to worry about avalanches. You’re giving yourself new, unnecessary anxieties, it said. Not that any of your anxieties are necessary.
Okay, no, I got to call them my anxieties because it was my anxiety, but for anyone else, even ART, they could fuck right off and keep to calling them “realistic concerns.” I promptly informed it of that. Also, ex-fucking-cuse me, “my anxieties are unnecessary”? I sent it an indignant fork bomb that it quashed like a bug as I said, out loud (verbal conversations are a thousand times more excruciatingly slow for it than for me, and yes it’s used to being patient but it doesn’t have to, with me) just to be extra annoying, “Me and my ‘unnecessary anxieties’ have saved you and our humans’ asses at least five times over.” I was exaggerating to be obnoxious. But my anxieties have been proven to be justified before.
Five— ART cut itself off, bleeding some other complicated feeling for 0.03 seconds before it swept that away behind some partition, which I prodded at because I’m also an asshole. Yeah, I knew I got the number wrong, but I wasn’t wasting the time or processing to go through my memory files to tally up exactly if it was one or two or fucking three and a half times or what. ART had the processing power to spare for navigating this interaction while also navigating the wormhole to Preservation and performing ten simultaneous surgeries and being a pedantic fuck who already spent the fraction of attention and couple of milliseconds necessary to tally that shit up.
I wasn’t interested in whatever the actual number was (according to whatever parameters ART set anyway). I deleted the section ART just wrote for the avalanche detection module we’d been coding. Stars shitting void, I hate that, I said, hating it so much I forgot to be obnoxious with my out-loud voice. Who codes for risk assessment like that?
Me, said ART, all offended super-AI pride. Before it could mention how much more processing power it had than me, blah blah I knew all of it already but security was still my specialty, I dropped a ten minute long audio clip of ART bragging about its big swollen bulkhead into our shared feed. It crunched right through that as I sent it a second packet with records of some of the worse security decisions it's made. It was silent for about two seconds. Well, it said with dignity I didn't buy, your risk assessment module is broken.
Oh yeah, it was completely, totally, irreparably borked. The stupid thing was even more of a terminal optimist than Arada and had no sense of danger, at all. (Which is, you know, really bad for something that assesses risk. And debugging has never worked. I’ve just kinda given up on it.) But still: That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to properly code for risk assessment, I said. My risk assessment module borked itself because lowest bidder, shitty corporate products, whatever. I never touched it.
ART’s feed presence did something really weird, frumpling up and putting off yet more (but distinct) weird readings before it smoothed itself out as if I somehow didn’t notice the behemoth leaned against me crinkling like a wrapper in a sink. Query: diagnostic, I pinged again, politely this time, paired with a sarcastic eyeglass sigil.
It ignored me and just dumped 247 preliminary (did I mean preliminary or something else?) plans to make modifications to me so I’d function better in the cold. What do you think? it asked.
The sudden stress on my processing made me lag just enough for my buffer to spit out, “This unit is experiencing an unexpected increase in processing load. Please stand by.” Pretending that didn’t happen, I said, You just modified me. I’m not sure where I was going with that. I wasn’t complaining. More internal storage is always good, and it’s not like my disconnected dataport needed any of the space for the wires and shit that made it functional. It just had to look and plug like a real one on the surface. And compared to the time I let ART shave two centimeters from my limbs, it was nothing.
I guess I was feeling strange about having ART chomping at the bits to…upgrade me? To give me newer, better parts and improve my design. Acting like it wasn’t wasting perfectly good components to refurbish a cheap old rental unit like me.
ART drew back most of the files. You are correct in that it would take time to gather the parts and synthesize a new power core, much less commit to such an extensive configuration change. I hadn’t said anything like that, but okay, if that’d get it to cool its engines. It will only take another 1.41 cycles to reach Preservation Station. You can’t properly deliberate on something like this in such scant time with your limited processing power. These will keep until you return to me. I didn’t want to talk about it then either? For now, we could consider lesser measures for protecting you from subfreezing conditions, it concluded, pushing a small packet at me, leaking some nervousness into the feed.
I took it. I thought subfreezing conditions were an unnecessary concern? I reminded the giant hypocrite while I riffled through files on insulation, blah blah; basically it wanted to make me thermal underwear and all that human shit, except specifically designed for SecUnits so the focus was on protecting where my inorganic parts and organic-inorganic seams were most vulnerable.
It is not impossible, it said with dignity I would've reported as a fraudulent product, that you would find yourself in such a situation nonetheless. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
I was the one who decided to code a module to detect and monitor for avalanches, so there was no argument from me. I just wanted it to acknowledge its hypocrisy. I pinged it, returning the files with my comments attached.
The response/rescue procedure protocols had bloated into a miniature databank on not just what the fuck to do if there is an avalanche, but what the fuck to do about the cold in general. I’m pretty sure ART just stuffed in a copy of the hypothermia protocols from its MedSys. Thankfully ART’s pride had made it determined that the chip for my (new, bonus) auxiliary storage would be state of the art. That meant I could shove all this mess in without having to delete any of my media. Hey, stop that, I said, swatting more MedSys shit out of ART’s metaphorical hands. At this rate, you’ll download an entire MedSys in me.
(Sometimes I like to imagine creative visuals for feed interactions. Picture ART as one of those fantasy dragons, but with more heads and a lot more eyes. Imagine all those big dragon heads swinging around to stare at you with all their eyes (except for the ones already on you and two that had to pay attention to somewhat important shit like running the ship). Imagine the wing that’d been draped over you fluttered with an excitement you could feel heating the scales surrounding you. Actually maybe this is a bad comparison exercise. I’m not sure it’s helpful or useful or anything. But whatever, that’s just what it felt like to be me at that moment.)
Ah.
Oh no. I’d given it ideas.
ART bombarded me those ideas, shoving one of those great big heads against my head, breathing hot air right into my face, and just generally being as overbearing as a blackhole. Good thing I was used to it. Fuck no, I snapped, I’m not letting you download a MedSys on me! That would take up so much space. What about room for media? Also, trust me, you do not want a SecUnit to be administering your medical care. You kinda get what you pay for with murderbots; we’re really good at murdering (even though that shouldn’t be our function) and not much else. Well okay, no, rogue SecUnits can just do whatever they want, like security for chosen clients with no murdering involved. And sometimes, we’re even good at that or at least not actively bad at it like humans are. But we are still, you know, blunt force weapons of people? Not medics. Or at least I definitely couldn’t cut it as someone responsible for fixing others instead of keeping them from needing the fixing. Maybe other rogues would have hands capable of healing instead of hurting, but it’s not me. [Edit]
(Wait, that sounded so stupid and maudlin. I should delete that. That was seriously so fucking mopey. Ugh. But I’m supposed to do less of the whole “editing feelings away” thing. Whatever.) [Delete]
It’s not like I want to be responsible for sick and/or hurt humans anyway. (I’d freak out so bad.) I especially don’t want to deal with all their fluids. (Again, I’d freak out so bad.) So I was absolutely not letting ART jam a whole fucking MedSys in me, and I was definitely not getting a fucking miniature surgical suite shoved into my arms where my fucking guns are, what the fuck ART! Are you picturing me with scalpel fingers, you freak? I demanded, letting the edges of my feed presence go sharp and needle into this asshole’s walls. It hoarded all the data it’d dumped in its excitement and didn’t answer me. You are! Stop that! It’d been an excruciating subjective ten minutes and an objective second since I accidentally fucked myself over by giving ART ideas. (I thought about that one second delay on my mouth again.)
It pretended not to hear me. Which I guess was better than blatantly lying to me about all the weird shit it wanted to do to me? (The only reason why I wasn’t freaking out about it was because it wouldn’t actually do anything without me okaying it, even if it got pushy sometimes.) It asked, So how did you manage to give yourself anxiety about avalanches in the first place, or are you so talented in hating planets that your brain chanced upon this nightmare unprompted? all while some small bit of it snuck up to get at the data from the expanding capillaries in my face. (I smacked it away because it’d pictured me as some horrific mash-up of a Sec-MedUnit, so I wasn’t in the mood to give it what it wanted. In fact, I cut off the sensory data transfer entirely.)
As a conversational redirect, that was so shockingly bad that I almost blurted, “Are you having a stroke?” out loud with my mouth. And then because why the fuck not, I said in the feed, Are you having a stroke?
A second is really long for ART.
I spitefully set the response protocols file to read-only and closed it as it busied itself with the code for the module. (I didn’t stop working on that with it of course. The module was for me and what the fuck else was I gonna do while I was stuck in low power mode anyway? This instance of ART and passive monitoring of its cameras was more than enough to keep me completely occupied.)
It made an exasperated-fond grab for the file, and I pulled it away. Why are you being so weird? I demanded. I have the excuse of lower function from low power if I’m weird right now, but you don’t.
It’s nothing, ART dismissed. Sure. I projected my skepticism at it as pointedly as I could manage. It broke after 3.6 seconds. You wouldn’t wake up, it said in a neutral tone scrubbed of all metadata.
What? I looked at my logs. Sure enough, I’d received several hundred pings from ART around five minutes ago. Usually a single ping is all it takes to wake me up when I’m sleeping during a recharge cycle since my inorganic systems don’t shut down, but I’d been stuck asleep this time for some reason. Huh, weird. I said, Huh, weird.
That’s all you have to say??? said ART. Its upset (can that be used as a noun?) hit me like a fucking hauler bot. (I dunno if you’ve ever experienced that. I hope you haven’t. It’s not fun. As in: it doesn’t rate much better than being disassembled while conscious on my “wouldn’t do it again” scale. Then again context matters. Not all hauler bot flattenings are created equal. Don’t ask me how I know.)
If I was having feelings about this that weren’t bleed-over from ART, I was busy burying them between some obscure lines of my code. (Actually an idea just occurred to me. Since some SecUnit bones have tracking software in them, I could theoretically delete the tracking and stick something else in the hollow space. Important things like a copy of choice.exe. Or maybe the code that tells my systems how to make hormones, the little bastards responsible for emotions. That’d be funny, excising it from my brain and having my left thigh try to run it to make cortisol instead. I think that’d also really fuck me up though.) What’s there to say? My act-like-a-human code made my body do its best to shrug while curled up on its side wrapped up in blankets. So something fucked up between my organic and inorganic systems. It happens. I woke up.
Wow, ART was not happy. I was kinda too tired to give much of a shit, to be honest. I didn’t want to not care and leave ART hanging with all those negative emotions, but I didn’t feel like I’d recharged or gotten any sleep at all. A 5% power level warning popped up in my feed. So I hadn’t gotten any recharging done, or all the power drained way too fast. Oh, maybe my batteries were giving out. I’ve become aware I’m kind of really old for a SecUnit, a geriatric (I learned this word from Drama Sun Islands) SecUnit, but also I’m a cheap rental unit with cheap parts.
I was tired enough that I couldn’t bother with words anymore and just used LanguageBasic. Basically, I just told ART those thoughts about the battery, my age, and the quality of my components. And then I said, “Bye, I’m going to bed,” right after telling it maybe my batteries were fucked and wouldn’t hold a charge anymore, and conked out. Because I’m a genius. (That was sarcasm, by the way. Just to make it clear. I’m very aware this asshole transport nearly bombed a colony over me. Not (ART) a single (ART) person (it was mostly ART) let me forget about that. So my last thought was that I hoped it wouldn’t lean into its whole supervillain thing and just calmly let me charge or something.)
POWER LEVEL: 4% AND DROPPING, INITIATING RECHARGE